


Fade to Black and Back

by ShannonPhillips



Series: A Little Less Attitude and a Little More Altitude [19]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: 69 (Sex Position), Anal Sex, Angst, Blind Character, Blow Jobs, Bondage, Canon-Typical Violence, Caretaking, Cowgirl Position, Cunnilingus, Dirty Talk, Drunk Sex, Embarrassment, F/M, Flogging, Fluff and Smut, Group Sex, Hurt/Comfort, Inappropriate Use of the Force, Injury Recovery, Intercrural Sex, Mutual Masturbation, Original Character(s), PIV, Phone Sex, Physical Abuse, Power Play, Reference to Canonical Character Death, Rimming, Sex Toys, Shower Sex, Vaginal Fingering, Walking In On Someone, Well Holocom Sex Actually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-01
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-05 17:45:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 47,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6714817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShannonPhillips/pseuds/ShannonPhillips
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a sequel to "<a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/4835939">Fade to Black</a>," focusing on the second season of Star Wars: Rebels. Like the original series, it consists of one fic per episode of the show, exploring the intimate and offscreen moments between Kanan and Hera. Most of the chapters are Explicit but a few are rated Gen or Mature, and these are noted at the beginning of each chapter. Two of the chapters <em>don't</em> feature Kanan and Hera: chapter 6 centers on Ketsu Onyo and Sabine Wren (romantic, but not explicit), and chapter 19 centers on Captain Rex and Ahsoka Tano (I would call it non-romantic but deeply caring; it could also be read as romantic).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Lost Commanders

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks to [gondalsqueen](http://archiveofourown.org/users/gondalsqueen/pseuds/gondalsqueen) for beta reading, bouncing ideas around, and being the kind of intelligent, responsive, attentive reader that makes me want to keep writing. (She is also, probably not coincidentally, an excellent writer herself and you like my fic you'll almost certainly like hers too.)

Hera’s elbow deep in hyperdrive repairs when his signal comes through. “Kanan,” she says, not looking up from her wiring. “What’s the situation?”

“Oh, normal,” he says, and there’s enough tension in his voice that she’s already kicking the transmission over to holo (literally kicking—she does it with the toe of her boot) as she answers:

“That bad?”

“Yeah,” he says. “You?”

Terse. Shut down tight, that’s bad. But he’s reaching out to her—that’s good, that’s a lot more than he knew how to do in the early days. “Hold on,” she says. “Let me get to the holoprojector.”

She keeps babbling as she clamps down the loose wires and reroutes the power flow into a configuration that won’t blow everything up if she steps away for a minute. Then she shimmies herself out from under the console. She’s still listing off her complaints as she stands, but this is work she doesn’t really mind doing. He’ll understand that. And he’ll also get the important part of the message, which is that the hyperdrive won’t be repaired for another rotation.

His face on the holo—as she's sliding into the dejarik booth, dusting off her gloves and adjusting her cap—is thunderous. Mouth twisted down, and thick brows drawn tightly together over his hawk’s nose. But she can tell the exact moment that the visual picks up on his end, because there’s a flash of relief in his eyes, and an oh-so-slight softening to his scowl.

“All right,” Hera says. “I’m here. Spill.”

He looks away. Another bad sign—he _is_ going to tell her, but it’s hard enough that he can’t look her in the eyes while he does. “They’re clones,” he says. “Ahsoka’s friend is a clone, and he’s got more with him.”

Hera thinks several things at once. _So that’s why—But Ahsoka must know—_ Trust him _, she said._

“From the war?” she says, at last.

The Empire’s not making new clone troopers. Or are they? Her stomach lurches for a split-second before Kanan answers: “Yeah.” And then, thickly: “They say they never killed Jedi. That they took out their chips.”

“How’d it go?” Hera asks, making her voice as gentle and as warm as she can.

His mouth twists, but his eyes flash back to hers. “Oh,” he says, with false levity. “Badly. –Nobody died.”

“Then it went well,” Hera jokes, and Kanan’s face relaxes a little more. He’s still looking her in the eyes. That’s good.

“I told Ezra,” he says.

It takes her a minute. “About my master,” Kanan prompts, and then she understands. Depa Billaba—a name she’s heard from Kanan exactly once, but a conversation she’ll never forget. The woman who was the closest thing he ever had to a mother. Gunned down, but not before she won Kanan (he had another name, then) the time he needed to run.

“Ah,” Hera breathes softly. And after a moment: “I’m glad.”

“These aren’t the same ones,” Kanan says. His gaze goes long, unfocused. “Not Grey and Stiles. They just…look like them. Like they would have looked.” Hera just waits, and after several heartbeats Kanan says, softly: “Or Stance.”

The names don’t mean anything to her, but she’s not sure Kanan is actually talking to her any more. “Hey,” she says, and his attention snaps back to her face. “You have a lot of back-up down there.” _You’re not alone this time_. “You’ve got this.”

And now even through the wavering blue light of the holo she can see his gaze sharpen. She can _feel_ it. “I miss you,” he says, open and direct. The deep husk of his voice shivers along her spine. When he’s really focused on her and nothing else, it’s like the whole galaxy goes still around her.

“Already?” she teases. “You’ve only been gone a few hours.”

“Always,” he says simply. “And more than you’ll ever know.”

Her smile fades. He’s said those words to her before—the memory is dancing just out of reach, but she’s pretty sure it’s not a good one. And he must have caught the change in her expression, because he leans in, trying to distract her with the twist of a smile. “What are you wearing?”

“Seriously?” Hera says dryly.

“No,” Kanan says. “You should go.” But that half-smile lingers, and he’s still watching her.

“I should,” she agrees. And then she rests her elbows on the dejarik table, leaning closer to the holoprojector in a mirror of his own gesture. “Under the flight suit? A pair of frilly synthsilk knickers. With lace.”

This is a lie. Hera’s underpants are spun from a natural fiber material, undyed and unadorned. The kind of fabric that every Outer Rim planet grows in surplus, and sells to its own citizens. She picks them up in packs of a dozen from the local markets.

“The kind they sell on Corellia?” Kanan’s gaze grows heavy-lidded, though no less sharp.

“Mm-hmm,” Hera lies again. She has no idea what kind of lingerie they sell on Corellia. They make the finest ships in the galaxy there. Why would anyone visiting Corellia waste time on anything but the shipyards?

Kanan’s smile splits into something wolfish. “You’re lying to me, Hera Syndulla.”

“You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”

There’s a moment when they just gauge each other over the holo—when it’s still half a joke and half a dare, and either one could laugh and shake their head and end the transmission. Then Kanan throws a glance over his shoulder, judging privacy in the Phantom. Hera takes a quick look around too. Chopper has made himself scarce somewhere: unusually tactful, for him. He probably knows that if she finds him she’s going to put him to work on the hyperdrive.

Then—“Mine aren’t frilly,” Kanan says. The holoprojector is only showing her his torso, but she’s familiar with those tight, controlled arm movements: he’s unsnapping his belt. Her breath catches.

“I can’t actually see,” she admits. “How…” she swallows, then starts again, covering her nervousness with a husky tone. “…Hard are you?”

His arm is still moving, just below the holocam’s field of vision. A tense, rhythmic gesture. “Getting there,” Kanan rasps. “How wet are you?”

Hera kicks up a knee, resting it against the table as she lets her other leg slide down. She leans her head back, closes her eyes, and lets her fingers find the right place between her thighs. Little circles, grinding the fabric of her clothing against her most sensitive nerve endings. “Getting there,” she says.

“I can’t see all of you either,” Kanan says. She opens her eyes to see holo-Kanan hunched forward, still watching her intently. “But if I were there, I’d be stroking your lekku now.”

“Like this?” she breathes, running a gloved palm over her tchun. A slow heat ripples over her scalp and down her back.

“And kissing your neck,” he says. His voice is even deeper and rougher than usual.

She lets her fingertips drift down, tracing the line of her own throat as she lifts her chin. “Here?”

Kanan makes a low noise of assent. “And wrestling with those blasted buttons on your flight suit.”

“These buttons?” Hera deftly unhooks the fabric of her flight suit from her armor, setting the chest and shoulder pieces aside. She’s suddenly aware of the thin fabric of her shirt brushing the tips of her breasts. “Then what would you do?”

“Anything you damn well wanted me to,” Kanan says fervently, and she can’t help but laugh. But it’s a short, explosive breath of laughter, tense with urgency.

“I want you to stroke your cock for me,” she says huskily. “If I were touching you I’d work it hard and fast. I want to see you come undone, lover.”

He makes a small, mostly-stifled groan. “Let me see you?” The rising note in his voice makes it a question.

So she opens her shirt for him, shedding the last bit of fabric with a flourish that makes her breasts bounce, and wrings another half-stifled moan from Kanan. She still can’t see below his waist, but she can feel the heat of his eyes raking over her.

“Keep pumping that hard cock for me,” Hera breathes into the comm. “If I were there I’d stroke it—lick it—”

“Hera,” Kanan cuts in, his voice thick. “Touch yourself.”

So she slides a hand over her bare belly, and up to cup her breast. Rolls a nipple between her fingers, tugging outward. It’s a sharp, intense spike of sensation, but the thing that truly sends a pulse of heat through her is Kanan’s reaction. His face goes very still, intent—mouth open slightly, and eyes narrowed to slits, while his arm still moves in that quick, tight rhythm.

She lifts her other hand, so that she’s caressing both breasts. “You’re…so…beautiful,” Kanan gasps. He’s right on the edge. She’s not—but if he was really here—if she could feel his arms around her, his mouth on her skin…

Hera lets her eyes flutter closed. Her breath comes hot between her parted lips. “Kanan,” she breathes.

“I’m here.”

She slides one hand down between her legs, still palming her breast with the other. Squirms in the bench until she can get _just_ the right angle. Then squirms a little more because she enjoyed Kanan’s sharp intake of breath.

Then a stray thought crosses her mind, one that almost sours everything: _never thought I’d be putting on a show for a human._

Her eyes flick toward the holo. Kanan gazes back at her, steady and open. “I’m here,” he says again.

 _I’m not doing this **for** him_ , she thinks. _I’m doing this **with** him_. And then she closes her eyes again, driving out all thought but the touch of her own fingers, the pulse of her rising desire, and the awareness of her lover—beside her, and a world away. She hears the barest sound he makes as he comes. And some long minutes later, she cries out softly herself, shaking in release.

When looks up again she sees Kanan’s expression has turned half-smug and half-rueful. “I still don’t believe you’re wearing lacy underpants,” he says.

She swallows a smile. “Well, I could be.”

There’s some companionable silence as they both put themselves back in order. When she’s got all her clothes back on, Hera remarks: “Clones, huh? Ahsoka’s always full of surprises.”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Kanan grumbles. “The great leader’s not coming back with us.”

“Aaaand…you don’t want him to.” Kanan doesn’t answer, so after a moment Hera says: “I understand your fears. But I also remember when the Jedi and clones fought side by side.” She chooses her words carefully, but this needs saying: “They saved billions of lives. Including my own.”

Kanan sighs heavily. “I know.”

“Then…maybe that’s a start?” He doesn’t have an answer for her, and she doesn’t need one. “I gotta get back to these repairs if we’re ever gonna get out of this system. Signal when you’re on route.”

She ends the transmission with brisk confidence. Kanan knows what he needs to do, and so does she. No point in clogging up the comm channels any longer.  

She already got the message.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you enjoy misuse of comlinks, may I also recommend "[Calling Home](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6003475)" by Gondalsqueen? You won't be disappointed.


	2. Relics of the Old Republic

“Thank you for trusting my friend,” Ahsoka says.

“It wasn’t easy,” Kanan laughs. Then his laughter dies. “It’s still not.”

That came out too blunt. They’re looking at him.

“Nothing worth doing ever is,” Ahsoka says serenely. It’s the kind of formula that sounds wise until you start to think about it. Breathing’s pretty easy; also worth doing. His old masters used to tell him things like that all the time, and Kanan was never able to turn off the part of his brain that poked holes in their sayings. It’s pretty annoying, actually, now that Ezra’s doing the same thing to him.

But Ahsoka’s got the confidence to pass it off—Ezra doesn’t question her. And Kanan’s just grateful that she stepped into that awkward silence. The moment passes smoothly. The group moves on.

After they’ve said their goodbyes, and the Ghost crew's returned to their ship, Kanan paces the passageways. He was only gone for one night, but he feels a need to check on everything. Rationally, he knows that Rex is an ally. But something in his pulse, in the pit of his stomach, believes that they’ve invited death into their home.

Caleb was fourteen when the clones turned on him. When his first home fell to battle on a front they never thought to protect. Ezra is fifteen. Sabine is sixteen. It could happen again.

_It will not happen again_ , Kanan tells himself. For all the good it does.

What actually helps is finding Chopper in the cockpit and checking readouts on the hyperdrive (Hera fixed it perfectly, of course). Looking on Zeb and Ezra in their quarters (asleep) and Sabine in the dim, quiet common area (reading). Sitting in the gun turret for half an hour, tracking space debris on the targeting console while he recalibrates the sensors.

Then he needs to see Hera, even though he’s been more or less avoiding her, because she’s gotten too good at reading his moods. He doesn’t want her sympathy or her concern. But he can’t set this aside until he sees her.

She’s in the docking bay, inspecting damage to the Phantom. Kanan hovers just beyond the hatch, watching the back of her head and the delicate movements of her hands. Gradually the knot in his stomach eases. He thinks he’s gone unnoticed until she says: “I saw some scoring to the hull so I’m checking the steering. Looks fine, though. What kind of hits did it take?”

“Nothing direct,” Kanan answers, easily enough. “We came under fire when we were on the walker, but Ezra and I deflected the blasts away from the Phantom. He might’ve let a ricochet glance off the hull, I’m not sure.”

She turns, then, to give him an affectionate glance. “ _He_ might’ve.”

“What? His control’s not perfect yet.” Kanan’s indignation is entirely feigned. Her ribbing is good—makes him feel more normal. Their banter is an easy and familiar rhythm, and he can recognize himself in it.

“Not like yours,” she smiles.

He lifts an eyebrow. “Do you have cause to complain about my _control_ , Captain?”

“No complaints,” she says archly. And then, more seriously: “But I am going to run a full diagnostic. And you should get some rest.”

“You’re right,” he admits. He didn’t sleep the night before. Couldn’t. Someone had to keep watch over Sabine and Ezra in the clones’ fortress. And his animal brain is trying to tell him that he _still_ needs to keep watch—but if Hera’s staying awake, that should be enough. He ducks into the Phantom, crossing over to her, and she straightens at his approach just long enough for him to press a quick kiss against her cheek. His hand lingers on the small of her back, then drops away. She’s already turning back to the console as he withdraws.

He’s expecting nightmares, but they don’t come. Instead he dreams of quiet moments by campfires. And of ghosts, but not fearsome ones. Just people he once loved talking to him casually, affectionately. He can’t make out any of the words and he keeps asking them to say it again, to say it louder, but they just smile fondly and continue their inaudible conversation. When he wakes he’s achingly sad but no longer afraid.

He pulls on his clothes, splashes water on his face, and goes to meet Ezra for their morning training. Ezra doesn’t seem to mind that they keep things low-key. He walks the kid through Soresu defense forms: a little more emphasis on the fundamentals, and Ezra will never let a stray weapons blast graze anything within the field of his protection again.

Kanan remembers a distant world. Two setting suns. Another kid and his master stepping through the Form III stances, and the words that were spoken then. He shifts his footing slowly enough that Ezra can mirror his movements, and he speaks in echo with the memory. “For now, form follows function. Function may be found in form.”

_Yes, master_ , Caleb said then. But in the present moment, Ezra protests: “What does that even _mean_?”

“It means straighten out your left wrist,” Kanan says. “And you’ll thank me later.”

Ezra corrects his stance, and they continue. When he’s focused, the kid picks things up at an astonishing rate. After they’ve gone through all the Form III stances twice, Kanan claps Ezra on the shoulder and tells him to take the rest of the day off.

“Sabine and Zeb were talking about a weapons test on one of the sister ships,” Ezra says. “Some kind of new torpedo ordinance. Can we go watch?”

“Sure,” Kanan shrugs. “Back by third shift?”

“Yeah, we’ll probably eat in the cafeteria over there. I mean, no offense.”

“None taken,” Kanan says ruefully. It’s his turn to cook, but there’s not much fresh food in the galley. He’s basically planning on boiled grains and ration-cube stir fry. Again. He doesn’t blame the others for wanting to score a meal elsewhere.

That train of thought leads him to the galley, though. He knows Hera stayed up late but she’ll be waking up soon. He brews a fresh pot of caf and brings some water and ground starch to simmer. It’ll make a gummy, tasteless cereal, but it’s filling.

Sure enough, after a few minutes Hera pads into the galley behind him, still yawning. “Is that caf I smell? And—ooh, what’s that?”

“Uh…gruel,” Kanan says. That sounds unappetizing, so he amends it with a sudden flash of inspiration: “Arkanian-style gruel.” He’s pretty sure the Arkanians would make it the same way, anyway: gruel is the same on every planet.

“Gruel!” Hera says happily. “And it’s hot!”

Kanan lets out an amused breath. When it comes to food, Hera is famously undiscerning; a Rancor wouldn’t touch her cooking, but she’s truly, genuinely delighted with anything she’s served. Now her eyes are sparkling with the promise of hot gruel. He shakes his head. “I love you.”

“I know! You made me gruel!”

“And caf,” he points out. He’s not above grubbing for credit where he can get it.

“And caf!”

He gets them both bowls. She gets them both mugs. “I take it the Phantom is fine?” She wouldn’t be in such good spirits this morning if she’d found any real problems.

She yawns again. “Yep. Just cosmetic damage.”

They take their food to the mess deck, settling in side-by-side around the dejarik table. After a couple bites Kanan gets up and wordlessly returns with some salt. He sprinkles it liberally over Hera’s bowl and his own: now at least it might taste like something other than warm paste. “Mmm,” Hera says encouragingly after her next bite. “Even better!”

Kanan just smiles and shakes his head again. Food was a good idea, though. He’s feeling a lot steadier.

“Where’s Chopper?” he asks after they’ve both mostly finished their breakfasts.

“Maintenance cycle,” Hera says. “Where are the kids?”

“Something is getting blown up on the other side of the fleet,” he says. “They went to watch.”

Her eyes rake over him, speculatively. He feels his eyebrow climb. “Privacy?” she drawls. “What a concept.”

Never let it be said that Kanan couldn’t take a hint. “I was going to ask,” he says, leaning in a little, “if there’s anything you want me to…look over. Since we have some time.”

Her lips curve in a slow smile. Then she sways toward him, raising her chin, and that’s all the direction he needs. He reaches for her, dipping his head down to kiss her. Her mouth is soft and warm and eager, and she makes little throaty noises of enjoyment as he wraps his arms around her and pulls her close.

Time is a luxury. He appreciates that, as he’s kissing her slowly and thoroughly. When her hands start wandering he recognizes it as a signal—encouragement to progress things along a little—but he only holds her a little tighter and deepens their kiss.

She’s stroking his back, rubbing his shoulder and tracing the muscles of his upper arm, and her hums of appreciation are growing more urgent. But he won’t be rushed. He reaches up to unsnap her pilot’s cap, breaking off their kiss just long enough to draw it down over her lekku. Hera closes her eyes, shivering.

The cap goes on the table. Kanan claims her mouth again, wrapping one arm around her waist and stroking the other hand over her tchun. She moans against his lips and tugs at his shirts, loosening them enough that she can slide a palm against his skin.

Gradually, between kisses, they strip each other to the waist. Belts and holsters, armor and fabric drop to the deck. A low-voiced breath escapes him when Hera’s breasts are bared to his sight. She gives him a smug little smile, and in response he swings her up and onto the table. Breakfast dishes clatter to the floor.

“Sorry,” Kanan mutters, but he’s already nuzzling at her skin.

“You’re cleaning it u—” Her words break off in a sharp gasp as his mouth closes on her nipple. She arches her back, winding her fingers in his hair. Her legs wrap around his torso. This is much better than those stolen moments on the holocall. Not that he’d turn down a tryst with Hera in any form—but this is better. The heat and the weight of her body in his arms. The honey-rich scent of her skin.

He kisses her, moving from one breast to another, still very much taking his time. She pants and writhes against him. Her boots are digging into his ribs, so he takes a moment to pull them off. This has the added advantage of letting him tug her flight suit even farther down, exposing extra inches of the skin below her navel. When he resumes his attentions to her breasts he also begins caressing her there, his fingers tracing slow and lazy circles that drag lower with each round.

Her fingers knead into his bare shoulders. She moans his name and again he feels an surge of desire in response. “Thank you,” he murmurs into the cleft between her breasts, the space over her heart. He doesn’t know how else to convey his relief. However hard it may be for him to come back from Seelos—to come back from Kaller, really—she is and always has been the home to which he’s returning.

She threads her fingers through his hair again, pulling another handful of it loose from his ponytail. He starts kissing her skin, gentle and soft, each time a little lower than the kiss before. She whimpers as he reaches her navel. His intent is clear, and finally she lifts her hips, allowing him to pull her flight suit off completely. Afterwards, at his gentle nudging, she parts her knees again.

“Hera,” he whispers, caressing her bare thighs. He could never find words to describe what the sight of her means to him—shameless and lovely, perched naked on the table, fully open to his gaze and touch.

She sighs and leans back as he begins to kiss and lick her. His hands end up hooked beneath her thighs, holding her in place even as she squirms. Her legs settle onto his shoulders and he grinds his tongue into her, making her shudder and whimper.

He works at her with singleminded focus. Her cries grow steadily louder, triggering an electric response in his own body. He concentrates, reaches out with his awareness—sometimes, when they’re particularly in tune, he can sense what she’s feeling. It comes in like the tide, waves of sensation that are distant at first and slowly build to a crashing force.

And then he feels something else. Kanan jerks his head up, turning a split-second before the hatch whooshes open.

“Captain Syndulla? I’ve been working on these maps and—” Rex stops short, his face draining of color as he takes in the scene.

Kanan’s already sliding out of the booth, gaining his feet in a surge of anger. “ _What_ are you doing here?” he growls, stalking forward to fill the old clone’s field of vision.

“I—I’m sorry, Commander Jarrus,” Rex stammers. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you while you were…” His eyes slide to the side, but not before Kanan sees the glint of humor there. “…Eating.”

Kanan barely restrains himself from throwing a punch. And in the same moment, he sees that Rex caught that—the clenching of his fists, the jerk of his arm. The clone’s stance shifts to one that Kanan recognizes from a hundred barroom brawls.

“ _Kanan_ ,” Hera says from behind him. It’s a warning, but she doesn’t sound outraged or betrayed. He never actually promised her, out loud, that he would guard her intimate moments from the rest of the world. That pledge was one he made to himself, the first time she surrendered herself under his hands—and every other time that followed.

“Get out,” he snarls, and takes another step forward. Right up in Rex’s face, staring down at him with naked threat.

And in the next second, the part of his mind that’s always gauging tactics and predicting outcomes registers his mistake. Rex is squared up and not giving an inch. He’s a clone trooper—he’s someone whose entire constitution and upbringing probably renders him incapable of backing down when offered a fight.

“Said I was sorry,” Rex says gruffly. “If you wanted privacy maybe you should try your bunk.”

“Maybe you should try _knocking_ ,” Kanan snaps. But he forces himself to unclench his fists, and to lean back on his heels—granting Rex the tiny amount of space that will allow him to stand down. Any other course of action is only going to lead to them both sporting matching shiners, and he doesn’t relish the thought of explaining _that_ to Ezra and Sabine.

“Bunks,” Rex repeats stubbornly. “If not out of consideration for these old eyes, then at least for the sake of the captain. She’d be more comfortable with a pillow under her.”

“ _Rex_ ,” Hera says. “That’s enough. I’ll look over the maps later. Thank you.”

Rex snaps off a salute. “Aye-aye,” he says. And just for a moment, as he turns to go, Kanan catches that sly glint in his eyes again.

The hatch closes behind him. Kanan runs a defeated hand through his half-loose hair and finally turns to face Hera. She’s still sitting on the table but she’s grabbed up Kanan’s shirt, holding it to her body to provide some cover. She looks about as dignified as a person caught in a compromising position possibly could. “I’m sorry,” Kanan says.

“You did pretty well,” she tells him.

“Not for—” He shakes his head. It’ll come out wrong if he tries to explain it.

She hops off the table, stepping lightly toward him to offer him back his shirt. She’s smiling, actually. “You have only one thing to be sorry for,” she says, and her voice is teasing and fond.

“What’s that?” Kanan asks dubiously.

“The pillow. Rex was right about the pillow.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now with art by Pornflakes!


	3. Always Two There Are

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was originally written for the [Star Wars Rebels kinkmeme](http://swr-kinkmeme.dreamwidth.org) to satisfy a request for "Kanan comforting Hera in the bedroom."

In the nightmare, Hera is running through darkened corridors and there is Something Bad in there with her. But she’s not being chased. She’s running after the bad thing, trying to fix her mistake, trying to catch up before it’s too late…and then she hears one thin scream in the distance and she knows it was too late from the very beginning…  
  
“Hera. Wake up.”  
  
She startles into consciousness, gasping. It’s dark in her cabin. She’s kicked off the blankets and her skin is cold with sweat. Kanan is kneeling beside the bunk, a hand on her shoulder. “It’s just a dream,” he says.  
  
“Kanan,” she gasps. “Sorry.”  
  
“It’s all right,” he says. “Do you want me to stay?”  
  
She shifts over to make room for him, and he stretches himself out beside her, wrapping his arms around her. She curls into him. “You’re shaking,” he says softly, his breath warm against her earcone.  
  
“I’m just cold,” she says.  
  
His arms tighten around her, and a moment later the blanket settles over her, guided by his will. Hera relaxes, just a tiny bit: Kanan’s casual use of the Force is as reassuring as the blanket. When she was a tiny child the Jedi meant safety, and for her at least one still does.  
  
“Was I loud?” she murmurs.  
  
“No,” he says. “But your fear woke me up.”  
  
“I was dreaming—about the Inquisitors, I suppose. I don’t know. It was confused.”  
  
He runs a hand down her back, slowly, soothingly. His silence invites her to continue, so after a moment she says: “I ordered them to go to that station, Kanan. I sent them in there alone. If they never came back it would’ve been _my fault_ , I would have been the one who killed them—”  
  
“No,” he says. His broad palm follows the curve of her spine, and when he reaches the small of her back, he lifts it to her shoulders and strokes her again. “It wasn’t your fault.”  
  
“They trusted me,” she says. “And I sent them into—” She shudders again, and this time she can’t pretend it’s from the cold.  
  
“Shh,” he says, and kisses her. His lips on hers are gentle but assured. He kisses her long enough for a slow warmth to ignite in her core, and then he pulls back to say: “We can’t always keep them safe. The galaxy isn’t safe. What we need to do is give them the skills to survive.”  
  
“They’re good,” Hera says. “They’re extraordinary. But thrown into an ambush without any warning—”  
  
“They came back,” Kanan says.  
  
_This time_ , she thinks, but what she says is: “I need better intel.”  
  
Kanan makes a soft noise of assent. In the dimness she can just make out the glimmer of his eyes. He’s thinking about how to get what she’s asked for. Hera feels a pang of regret: now he’s internalized her own anxiety, made her problems into his.  
  
“I’m all right,” she says. “Do you want to go back to sleep?”  
  
He lifts his hand to her cheek, brushing his thumb across her skin. “Do you?”  
  
“I don’t think I can, right now,” she admits, and then he leans in to kiss her again. Now there’s more heat to it, and clear intent. She parts her lips for him, lets him taste her deeply. His hand runs down her lek and this time her shiver is one of desire.  
  
Kanan shifts, moving his body over hers. He’s careful to adjust the blanket around them both so that she’s still covered. She slides her hands down the sides of his bare torso, all hard muscle under warm skin. His weight pressing down on her is familiar and comforting.  
  
He kisses her mouth, her neck, her tchin and tchun. She hums in pleasure and surges up against him, grinding her hips into his. She finds the waistband of his loose sleep pants and tugs it a little lower, slipping a teasing hand beneath the fabric.  
  
He lifts his hips to give her better access, propping his weight on one elbow. “Hera,” he breathes. He never calls her anything but her name, but when he says it like that he makes it sound like the most beautiful word in any language.  
  
She strokes him and he closes his eyes, breath coming faster. With his free hand he’s finding the fastenings to her own sleep clothes. He draws her shirt open and she feels cold air on her breasts, immediately replaced by the heat of his mouth.  
  
The sweet intensity of it drives most conscious thought from her mind. All lingering shreds of nightmare fall away. There’s only Kanan, his hands, his lips, his warmth and weight. He bares more and more of her skin, waking her body to his touch, making her nerves sing with sensation. He gently parts her thighs, fingers pushing inside her. She whimpers and bucks and clutches at him.  
  
He spends a long time teasing and exploring her. Two fingers become three, stretching and filling her—she knows what he’s doing, and the anticipation excites her. She catches his earlobe in her teeth and whispers: “I want you, love, I want you inside me—I want your cock driving into me—”  
  
He groans: she knows perfectly well what she can do to him with a few filthy words in a husky voice. He settles between her legs, and as he begins to push into her the pulse of hot pleasure makes her cry out. He thrusts shallowly, a little deeper each time, and she loses herself completely in sensation as her body yields to him.  
  
When she drifts back to herself it’s because he’s gone still. “Hera,” he says gently, and she realizes it’s not the first time he’s said her name. “Is it too much?”  
  
“No,” she gasps, “not too much—Kanan, Kanan I love you, I love this, I love—” She breaks off, back arching, as he sinks fully inside her, and then when she can form words again she says hoarsely: “It’s all I can feel, just you, there’s nothing else—it’s everything, it’s—”  
  
He pulls back, drives into her again, and she breaks off because she _can’t_ talk. She can’t even think. Words are nothing and there are only these waves of sweetness crashing over her body, so intense that it makes her eyes prickle with tears. Kanan slides one arm beneath her shoulders, pressing her against his chest as he takes her in a quickening rhythm. His head is buried in the curve of her neck, lips and teeth grazing her skin, and she’s rising to meet him with every thrust. She rakes her fingers down his back, cries out his name again and again.  
  
And then, when she’s writhing and panting and not sure she can endure any more, he pushes himself up on his elbows and takes her hand, moving it between them—he always knows exactly what she needs. The feeling of him driving into her is amazing, overwhelming, but to push her over the edge she needs pressure right…there…  
  
She comes in a crashing tide of ecstasy, screaming into Kanan’s shoulder as her body spasms against him. He fucks her through it, hard and fast, until his own climax seizes him just as hers is tapering away. She winds her arms around him and holds him until he relaxes and sighs.  
  
He rolls off her, adjusts the blanket again so it’s tucked around her. “Do you think you can sleep now?” he murmurs. In the darkness she sees the trace of a smile curve his lips. “Or do you need me to do that again?”  
  
“You would, too,” she laughs.  
  
“Of course I would.”  
  
“I can sleep,” she says. “You don’t have to stay.”  
  
“Can I, though?”  
  
In response she just cuddles into him, nestling her head against his shoulder. He wraps an arm around her, stroking her back again, slow and steady. Her breathing grows deeper and more even. She is asleep before she can hear him say:  
  
“I’m here, Hera. Sweet dreams.”


	4. Brothers of the Broken Horn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story owes an enormous debt to two very inspirational pieces of art: Lorna-Ka's [towel-draped Kanan](http://lorna-ka.tumblr.com/post/110109208913/art-block-works-in-mysterious-ways-i-swear-this), and CynderMizuki's "[Where The Walls Aren't Thin](http://cyndermizuki.deviantart.com/art/Where-The-Walls-Aren-t-Thin-591931708)."

“So,” Kanan says. “You went for a little spin.”

Maybe he should be angrier—it was only last week that he was arguing with Rex about the kid’s lack of discipline, after all. Maybe he should crack down hard on this kind of thing. But the truth is—he’s proud of his padawan. Ezra came back with the generators they needed. He got the job done.

And although Kanan and Hera certainly weren’t _pleased_ when they came back to the ship and found Ezra and the Phantom gone, Kanan discovered in himself a distinct lack of panic. He really does trust Ezra to handle himself, and he was able to convince Hera that everything would be all right.

After all—Ezra’s had some good teachers.

“I was just trying to figure things out,” Ezra shrugs.

“And did you?”

Ezra’s eyes follow Hondo as the old pirate limps away with his loot. “I used to be like Hondo,” he says. “Out for myself and alone. But that’s not who I am anymore.”

Kanan knows something about that. “You’re on a different path now,” he says gently.

“And…I have you guys,” Ezra answers, and Kanan can’t help but melt a little bit. He rests an easy arm around Ezra’s shoulders as they walk back up the gangway.

Hera joins him in the passageway to the crew quarters, watching as Ezra ducks through the hatch into the bunk he shares with Zeb. “Well,” she says, “you were right.”

“I’m always right,” he says with as much solemnity as he can manage.

“Aaaaand now you’re wrong again.” Then she turns a thoughtful gaze back toward the now-sealed hatch. “Sometimes I worry that we ask too much of them. Other times, I think maybe we don’t give them enough credit.”

He knows what she means. He’s had the same thoughts himself. “I was sent to the front lines when I was fourteen,” Kanan says. “You were even younger.”

She just nods. And then amends: “But not on my own.”

“Well, me neither,” Kanan says. “I mean, I wouldn’t have been, normally. —War has a way of changing everything.”

“ _Losing_ a war changes everything,” Hera corrects him. There’s a bitterness in her voice that she rarely allows to show. So he answers with just as much honesty:

“We’re trying to make a better galaxy for them. But we’re also preparing them to live in the one we’ve got.”

She gives another slow nod. Then she turns to him, her whole demeanor changing. “I’m going to test those generators,” she says briskly. “I’m still not totally convinced Hondo didn’t swindle us.”

“Good idea,” Kanan says. “I’m going to grab a shower, while the refresher’s free.”

Showers are a luxury, not so much because of the water—the Ghost’s water reclamation systems are highly efficient—but because of the time. Five organic crew members. One ‘fresher. The math is prohibitive.

For a few stolen minutes, though, Kanan has the shower to himself. He’s basking in the hot water—eyes closed, mind empty as the water sluices over him and his tired muscles relax—when suddenly the lights go out and the water cuts over to an icy cold blast. Kanan yelps, fumbling for the shower controls in the dark while the freezing spray drenches him. His teeth are chattering by the time he manages to shut off the water.

“It’s under control!” he hears Hera yell, somewhere out in the ship. “Stay where you are, guys.”

“Heeerrrra!” he yells back. He pats around in the pitch darkness and manages to locate something that he hopes is a towel.

Then he hears footsteps out in the passageway, and the ‘fresher hatch opens, letting in a bit of red light—the emergency lights are on in the main corridors of the ship. Hera’s silhouette is framed in the opening. “Sorry!” she says. “The generators work a little too well. Overloaded the main power and caused a cascading series of shorts.”

“Backup kicked in,” Kanan notes, swiping himself off with the towel. He’s immediately a little bit warmer: his shivering subsides.

“Yeah, give me a minute and I can have the shower back on for you.” Kanan takes a half-step backwards as Hera wedges herself inside: the ‘fresher is tight quarters for one. Two people trying to use it at once had better be…close. The hatchway closes behind her, but her multitool has a light function. A soft blue radiance spills out from her hands.

“Shower’s still working,” Kanan says as Hera kneels down to unscrew an access plate. Her shoulder is pressed against his thigh. “It’s just freezing cold.”

“Oh, so that’s why you shrieked like a mynock.”

“I sounded an alert call,” Kanan says, with dignity. “A controlled and manly alert call.”

“Mmm,” Hera says. “Tell me more.” She glances up saucily, tilting her light so that it sweeps up and down his body. The droplets of water still clinging to his skin glitter as the light catches them, and Kanan suddenly feels much less chilled. He lets the towel drop slowly and deliberately from his fingers.

“Controlled. Manly,” he says. “And alert.”

“I’ll say.” Her face is only a few inches from his swiftly-hardening cock. But then she turns back to the access panel. “Here, just let me get this. –Ah!”

The lights in the fresher return. “Try the water,” Hera suggests.

“You’ll get wet too,” Kanan points out. Where she’s kneeling, her left arm and most of her tchun would be in the splash zone. If she turns toward him, it would get the whole front of her.

In response she gives him that saucy look again and slowly, deliberately unsnaps her pilot’s cap and sets it atop his own pile of clothes. Then she starts unbuttoning her flight suit.

Kanan waits until she’s got the armor pieces off—wouldn’t be good for the leather to get wet. When she’s down to her loose white shirt he reaches back and punches the shower on. It’s hot against his back, and Hera lets out a…controlled, womanly alert call as the water drenches her face and chest. The fabric of her shirt is instantly plastered to her skin, revealing the curves of her breasts and the jutting tips of her nipples. Kanan finds himself quite alert indeed.

Hera wipes her face and glares up at him. “You could’ve warned me.”

The water makes rivulets down her lekku and over her shirt, and Kanan lets his gaze very obviously follow them. “I did,” he says. “Shower works great now, by the way. Better than ever.”

“Oh, it needs a little more work,” Hera says, and leans forward to take him in her mouth.

Kanan leans his palms flat against the bulkhead, closing his eyes. Warmth envelops him: the warmth of the water running down his back and side, the warmth of Hera’s mouth. She licks up and down his length, taking him deeply and then drawing back. Then the tip of her tongue slides under his foreskin and sweeps around the head of his cock, wringing a deep moan of pleasure from him.

He slits his eyes open just to see her, beautiful and wet and bobbing on his cock. She’s intent on her work, ignoring the water as it streams down her face and body. As he watches she wraps one hand around the base of his shaft and slides the other between her legs. Kanan groans again.

She settles into a rhythm, pumping his cock with her fist while her tongue teases the head. The little wet smacking noises she makes as his cock slides in and out of her mouth mingle with the sounds of the falling water. Pleasure pulses through him in waves, driven to further intensity by the sight of her fingers rubbing insistently against herself.

He moves his hands to her head, stroking her lekku, rubbing his fingers against her skin in time with her own rhythm. Her green eyes flash up to meet his and she gives a low, satisfied hum that reverberates through him.

As he reaches the brink of release Kanan’s hips begin to twitch. He uses his hands on her head to guide her—a light touch, nothing too demanding, but she yields and lets him take over the pace. He fucks her mouth in a quick, urgent beat: not deep, but fast. She tries to lick and suck him as his cock drives in and out of her mouth, and the loud slurping sound of it is now incredibly lewd. He goes still as he comes, taut and shaking with pleasure, and his lips silently shape her name.

She doesn’t pull back until he’s fully spent. Then she sits back on her heels, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth and looking smug.

Kanan reaches down a hand. “Come here,” he says in a sex-roughened voice, and pulls her up into his embrace. Now there’s no part of her that isn’t getting wet.

He kisses her tenderly, then helps her to peel off the rest of her clothing. It’s a bit of a dance, in the tight quarters, and _maybe_ Kanan isn’t helping as much as he could be, because he feels the need to stop and caress and kiss her as he strips her. Eventually everything comes off, kicked aside in a sodden pile. “It was time for laundry anyway,” Hera grins.

She’s readily compliant when he maneuvers her to face the bulkhead, guiding her with light pushes on her hips and shoulders. She places her palms against the wall, and he covers her back with his own body. The hot water sheets down on them both. He runs his hands up and down her skin, tracing her curves, making eddies in the tracks of the water. She sighs and tilts her head back against his shoulder.

He kisses her neck and cups her breasts, rolling her nipples between his fingertips. She gives a small cry of pleasure, so he continues to fondle her, until at last she grabs one of his hands and moves it impatiently down between her legs.

He rubs her the way she was rubbing herself, just a few minutes before. But the angle is wrong. She gives a low moan, trying to shift herself to get the right pressure. He shifts too, kissing her earcone now, and she moans again. Her hips are rolling up against his fingers. “Here,” Kanan breathes, and steps just slightly to the side—putting her under the shower’s full blast. His right hand lingers on her back, but his left hand has much better access, now. He slides a finger inside her, making her gasp.

Her breath comes in short, whimpering cries as he works his hand inside her. At the same time he’s giving small nipping kisses to her tchun, and he feels a shiver go through her. He pushes in a second finger, and with his thumb begins to flick and tease the sensitive tchilla that fringe her cunt. She shudders again, giving a long, low cry. Her hips buck, once and then again.

Pushing her over the edge now is just a matter of keeping up the pressure, matching her movements as she shakes with the rising surges of sensation—giving her no respite. He rubs his thumb in circles over her tchilla as his fingers continue to stretch and fill her. She shakes under his touch, her eyes clenched tight and mouth open, the hot water rushing over her naked body. Kanan’s half-hard again just watching her. “Stars, you’re beautiful,” he whispers fervently.

She comes hard, spasming around his hand and burying her face in her arms to stifle her scream. When she finally slumps in relief he pulls his hand away and draws her back into his arms. She rests her head against his shoulder, the water beating against her back, and for a moment they’re just quiet and still.

“I think that fixed it,” Hera says last.

Kanan laughs. “For now,” he says. “These kind of systems always need tune-ups.”


	5. Wings of the Master

Kanan sees three steps into the future.

Not _literally_. He just has a pretty good idea, if he thinks about it, how any given course of action will play out. He’s honestly not sure if it’s a Jedi thing or not. Master Billaba, in her gentle way, usually encouraged him to focus more on the present moment and less on possible futures. But she also didn’t seem taken aback by the lines of questioning he’d propose, which often involved chains of potential ramifications.

Janus Kasmir was the first to tell him, in so many words, that most people don’t think that way. It was after one of their black-market fences had attempted to swindle them in a spectacularly misguided fashion.

 _“Why did he do that?” Kanan had asked afterwards, staring around at the wreckage. “He knows you were bringing heavy carbines, because that’s what he asked for. He knows they can be overloaded, and he knows you. Why would he try to cheat us, when he_ knows _you have the option of blowing up the merchandise?”_

_“Because he’s greedy and stupid, kid.” Kasmir was sorting halfheartedly through masses of twisted metal, looking for something that might still have resale value._

_“Don’t call me kid,” Kanan had said automatically. And then, because he was still genuinely confused: “If you let the carbines be stolen you’d get nothing—at least this way you get some reputation. People will know that you don’t allow yourself to be double-crossed, and that’s worth something.”_

_“It’s not worth two crates full of heavy carbines,” Kasmir had said with disgust._

_“But he got nothing out of this! Why couldn’t he see that you’d choose the option where he gets nothing, and you at least get something?”_

_That’s when Kasmir had looked over at him. “Most people just see what they want to be true,” he’d said. “He wanted to get those carbines for free. So when he imagined this playing out, that’s what he saw. If you can see things how they really are, instead of how you want them to be, then you’ve got an edge. Use it.”_

Kanan flashes back to that memory when Hera, her voice full of passion, implores Sato to commit once more to the same blockade run that just cost them disastrously. “We _must_ finish this mission,” she says. “If we try again with our two remaining transports, I know I can get at least one through.”

She’s seeing what she wants to be true. He’s not sure she’s seeing things as they really are. Hera’s abilities, he doesn’t doubt for a second. But getting through that blockade doesn’t rely on her alone—the transport pilots and the other fighter pilots would have to operate flawlessly, and plans requiring flawless coordination don’t work in the real world.

Still, there’s no better option. “We don’t have much time,” he says. “The people of Ibaar won’t last another rotation without our help.” Maybe if they load the cargo in the Ghost—enh, that’s a crappy idea too.

That’s when Rex steps in. “There is an alternative. I’ve been in contact with an engineer who has no love for the Empire, and claims to have built a prototype heavy-assault starfighter—a blockade buster.”

Kanan tries to tamp down his annoyance. Rex couldn’t have mentioned this _before_ they lost ships and lives making a futile run at that blockade? “What’s the problem?” he snaps. “Let’s get it.”

“Shipmaster Quarrie will only discuss his ship in person, on the planet Shantipole.”

 _That_ provokes an immediate reaction from the other Phoenix pilots. “Shantipole?!” one cries, and the other chimes in:

“Every pilot in the galaxy knows that’s a one-way trip!”

Every pilot in the galaxy isn’t _Hera_. Kanan looks a few steps into the future, and for the first time he likes what he sees. Hera can bring that ship back, he’s sure of it—the only question is whether she can do it in time. “Hera will go,” he says, and doesn’t even try to hide the pride in his voice.

“Kanan, no! I—I’ve got to lead the next run on the blockade.” She’s gotten to the same place he has: she might not be back in time. But in that case there’s still the idea he hasn’t shared yet, about putting the cargo on the Ghost—it’s smaller and faster. Kanan can fly it. Maybe the Force will save his butt.

As back-up plans go, it’s not great. She wouldn’t like it at all, if he laid it out for her. But she doesn’t have any better options. She’s trying to give the fleet capabilities it doesn’t have through the sheer force of her will, through courage and tenacity and heart, and he loves her for it; but he also sees that _it won’t work._

So he volunteers her for the Shantipole mission. And she trusts him enough that she lets him do it, even though she’s not one bit happy about it.

There’s no tender goodbye. She’s too annoyed at him, and maybe that’s for the best: he’d prefer she stay irritated rather than asking exactly _who_ will be flying the blockade run if she’s not back in time. When she starts down that line of thought, he just smiles and waves it off: “Then you‘d better hurry!”

It’s not until he’s in the cockpit, alone, that he lets himself feel the actual weight of the situation. Ezra’s goofing around with Chopper: neither of them realize that Kanan’s preparing to take them on a near-hopeless mission into terrible odds. He’ll lay it out for Ezra, let the kid make his own choice. But Kanan knows which way it’ll go.

As the hours tick by, and Hera doesn’t return, Kanan thinks about scenarios he can prepare for. In the worst case one, is there anything he can do now to make the loss easier to bear? It’s a future where she comes home to find so much gone—him, Chopper, probably the Ghost itself. (And Ezra, but his mind flinches away from that: he can’t bring himself to believe it. Ezra’s destiny goes beyond this moment, he’s sure of it. And if he’s only seeing what he wants to be true, so be it.)

This is what Jedi do—put their trust in the Force, make a difference when they can, accomplish the impossible on a regular basis. And lay down their lives, if necessary, in defense of the innocent.

Hopefully it won’t come to that. But he’s glad Hera took Zeb and Sabine. She’ll have them to help her, she’ll have the new ship—and she’ll have a lot of work to do. The fleet will be vulnerable, in disarray. They’ll need her, and that purpose will sustain her through her grief.

He thinks of something he can do. He’ll need to dock up with the _Liberator_ —that’s only the work of a few minutes. “Ezra. Take over here for a bit.”

Ezra spins in his chair, and nearly falls out. “Wait, what?”

“You were co-pilot, now you’re pilot. Don’t go anywhere. I need to talk to Commander Sato—in person.”

Chopper spits out a stream of invective as he leaves the cockpit (Chopper’s probably right, he’d make a better acting captain than Ezra, but the sense of responsibility will be good for the kid.) He crosses over to the _Liberator_ and heads for the bridge.

“Commander Sato. A moment?”

Sato breaks off his conversation, turning to Kanan with obvious surprise. “Master Jarrus?”

“Nope,” Kanan says. “Uh-uh. Just Kanan.” Has Sato really gone all this time without addressing him directly?

Sato looks pained. “In the Republic military,” he says, “you would have been granted the rank of General. We can devise an equivalent title.”

Kanan winces. “No thanks. Really, it’s just Kanan.”

Sato just looks at him, still with that expression of profound unhappiness and unease. “…Or Spectre One?” Kanan offers finally, and the commander’s face clears with relief.

“Spectre One,” he says. “What can I do for you?”

“You need a new Phoenix Leader. I think you should pick Hera.”

“You came to the _Liberator_ —now—to tell me this?”

“Yeah,” Kanan says. “Now was the time.” He sees Sato’s eyes widen—oh, he thinks Kanan means some kind of mystical thing. “She’s the clear choice,” he says patiently. “I figured if you haven’t done it already, you probably have reasons I don’t know about. So I came to ask what they are.”

“I have considered placing Captain Syndulla in a position of higher command in the past. But she has made it clear that her cell prefers to operate with as much independence as possible,” Sato answers. His eyes linger, speculatively, on Kanan’s face. “I was under the impression that _you_ , and your protégé, require such independence in order to remain effective.”

Kanan blinks. “She’s turned down a promotion before?”

“It was never formally offered. I did not believe she would accept.”

“Because of me?”

“That was my impression,” Sato repeats.

“Well, make the offer,” Kanan says. “You can tell her I suggested it.”

He didn’t think Sato’s posture could get any stiffer, but somehow the man manages it. “I will take your recommendation under _advisement_ , Spectre One.”

Oh. He’s violated military protocol. Well, won’t be the last time—he hopes. “Thanks, Commander,” he says. A few minutes after he walks away, it occurs to him that he probably should have waited to be dismissed. _Oops_.

There’s nothing more he can do. He’s given them the best odds that he can, and if things don’t break their way he’s tried to make sure that Hera will have the back-up that she needs to go on without him. When the last hour runs out and Sato gives the command for the blockade run to begin, Kanan looks a few steps into the future and braces himself for what he sees there.

But _nothing_ could have braced him for the moment when Hera, in defiance of all reasonable predictions, brings the B-Wing screaming into the sky and proceeds to smash the Imperial blockade to smithereens. He cranes his neck to watch her, a grin splitting his face. Until Ezra cuts into his thoughts: “You know you still gotta fly, right?”

Stars, he could watch her work all day. “Yeah, yeah, I got it,” he says. “We’re clear! Going in.”

Hera’s voice crackles over the comlink: “We’ll hold off any pursuit once you’ve made the jump out.”

It’s straightforward from there. The cargo releases smoothly; the Ibaarans confirm they’ve got the drop. Kanan’s contact on the ground is overwhelmed with happiness and relief. “Thank you, Phoenix Squadron! You’ve saved us! You’ve saved us all.”

“You’re welcome,” Kanan says gravely. He doesn’t feel proud, not exactly: what he feels is calmer and deeper than that. A sense of rightness and belonging. He feels like he’s where he’s supposed to be; he’s _who_ he’s supposed to be. The flow of the universe moves with him and through him.

At the rendezvous point, Kanan collects Zeb and shipmaster Quarrie in the Phantom. Hera and Sabine dock the B-Wing and cross over from the _Liberator_. They’re joined by Commander Sato. When Kanan and the rest of the crew meet them at the airlock Hera tilts her head, giving them all a little smile. Kanan smiles back.

“Quarrie,” Hera says, her voice soft and warm. “Thanks to you and your ship we helped many people today.”

“I just hammered it together, young pilot,” Quarrie answers. “You made it soar.”

“Indeed,” Commander Sato says. “Your heroics are unparalleled, Captain Syndulla. That is why I agree with Kanan’s recommendation.”

Kanan slides a surprised glance over to Sato—the man even brought himself to use Kanan’s first name? But Kanan’s behind him, so Sato can’t see his slowly spreading smile.

Hera does, and she’s instantly on guard. “ _Your_ recommendation? What have you done _now_?”

“Just listen to the commander,” Kanan grins, folding his arms and leaning against a bulkhead.

“You are to be promoted to Phoenix Leader,” Sato says. “Our fighter pilots will benefit greatly from your expertise.”

Sato’s not even framing it as a question. Kanan doesn’t blame him—in Sato’s position, he’d do whatever he could to pressure Hera into taking that promotion, too. Leaders like her don’t come along every day.

She’s at a loss for words. Sato salutes her: the rest of the crew follow suit. Her eyes, round and uncertain, travel over them all.

It wasn’t so long ago that Kanan was arguing for them to leave this rebellion behind. Hera knew better then: he can see a few steps ahead, but she’s always seen so much farther. Where Kanan thinks tactically, Hera thinks strategically—she sees the bigger picture, she knows the destination. All Kanan can do is help her figure out how to get there.

He knows this is what she wants. And more than that: he understands, now, that it’s the right course for all of them.

“Good job, _Captain_ Hera,” he says, sketching a salute of his own.

And then her uncertain expression dissolves into happiness. She draws herself up, returning the salute with pride.

Kanan’s feeling pretty good about their day’s work as Sato leaves and the crew disperses. Most of them are going to enjoy some well-deserved down time. Hera turns to him. “Can we talk?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Your quarters?”

“Sounds good.”

Over the years their debriefings have developed their own comforting routine. Kanan and Hera pull off their boots, armor, and weapons, and slide into opposite sides of the bunk, their legs stretched out side-by-side. Kanan lays a companionable hand on her ankle. “So,” he says. “Congratulations.”

She doesn’t answer him directly. “You’ve been busy today,” she says, and in her carefully neutral tone Kanan picks up the first hint of warning. Is he on thin ice here?

“So have _you_ ,” he points out. She doesn’t seem like she’s still irritated with him, the blockade run was a resounding success, and he’s just demonstrated his willingness to commit to working with Phoenix Squadron. So…?

“I completed the mission,” Hera says. “You were doing…something else.”

The ice is definitely cracking. “I did my job,” Kanan says. “As I see it.”

“Maybe we should talk about that.”

He can’t hide his shock. “ _What?_ ” This isn’t thin ice, this is a direct plunge into frigid depths. The waters are closing over his head and he has no idea which way is up.

“What do you see as your job aboard this ship?” Hera asks calmly.

Forget three steps into the future—he can’t even predict her next word. He has no idea where this conversation is going: no idea how bad it might get. He flounders for a lifeline. All his instincts are telling him that if there is one, it’ll be found in simple honesty.

So he answers the question, as truthfully and as plainly as he can. “Training Ezra,” he says slowly. “Leading missions in the field. Figuring out how to do what you need done. Protecting this crew.”

Hera gives a thoughtful nod. “That’s reasonable,” she says. “It’s close to what I expect from you, too.”

Her carefully controlled words and tone are not at all reassuring. “What’s the difference?” he asks, because it’s the obvious next question.

“I’d say you’re my partner. That we work _together_ to determine priorities and plan missions.” Her voice is even, her huge green eyes level and direct. “You made a number of decisions for me today. Big ones.”

 _Now_ he sees the surface. And the ice floes. And the sharks. He moves his thumb against her ankle, just a fraction. “Was I wrong?”

“No,” she says mildly, “but that’s not necessarily the point.”

He lets his head fall back against the bulkhead. “The blockade run wasn’t going to _work_ without that ship.”

“And yet you were going to fly it anyway.”

“There was no choice. The Ibaarans were dying.” Kanan lets out a heavy breath. “I was hoping the Force would pull something out to save us. Instead, you did.” Even in the face of her—whatever-this-is: not anger, anger would be _better_ —he can’t help but smile at the memory.

She’s not smiling back. “I might have agreed with you. If we’d discussed it, instead of you overruling me at a command meeting.”

“There wasn’t time to talk it out,” Kanan says. No, that’s heading straight into the ice floes. He veers back toward the sharks. “And you already knew I was right; you wouldn’t have gone otherwise.”

“And while I was gone,” she says steadily, “you went to Sato over my head.”

Karabast. “Do you want me to apologize?” he demands. “For recommending you for promotion?”

She moves her ankle out from under his hand, crossing it over her other leg. “I don’t need an apology,” she says. “I need you to understand that _you can’t do this_. You can’t make these decisions without me. Even if you’re doing it _for_ me. Even if you’re sure that you’re right.”

“If I’m your partner,” Kanan argues, “doesn’t that mean that you trust me to make the calls sometimes?”

The calm mask of her face doesn’t waver. He _hates_ that they’re at this place, where she’s only showing him the mask. He’s trying to give her honesty and she’s giving him nothing of her true self back. “In the moment,” she says evenly, “I did let you make the call. But now that the mission is done, I’m telling you—you can’t do this.”

Kanan closes his eyes. There are a dozen more arguments at the tip of his tongue. Chief among them: _but it worked_.

It didn’t work, though. If they’re sitting here, and Hera’s so…( _not angry, not upset, what is she?_ )…that she’s clamped down tight and talking to him like he’s a supplier who tried to sell her brown algae, then something’s gone very wrong.

Follow that thought. _What is she?_ Profoundly uncomfortable, or she wouldn’t be controlling herself so tightly. Distanced. Untrusting. Something that is at the very core of her willingness to let down her guard with him has been shaken. That’s…unacceptable.

 _What is she?_ —She’s the captain. She can’t deal with him any other way if he doesn’t deal with _her_ , first and most fundamentally, as the captain.

Kanan opens his eyes. “Understood,” he says simply. “Next time, we talk first.”

For the first time, he can see the emotion in her eyes. It looks like relief. “Okay,” she says. Then she lets out a shaky breath, and draws a deep one. “Is there anything else we should discuss?”

“Yeah,” he says. “You’re terrifying me. Could you please just be angry so that you can, I don’t know, spank me and get it over with?”

That hangs there between them for a moment. Then the corner of Hera’s mouth twitches. “No,” she says drily. “You’d like it too much.”

And just like that, there’s solid ground underneath him again. He lets out a short bark of laughter, relief flooding through him. He reaches for her, and she doesn’t pull away.

He leans forward to run his hand over her ankle and up her calf, the loose material of her flight suit crinkling beneath his hand. “What if I say please?” He just wants her to _relax_. To be with him in a normal, familiar way.

She cocks her head, watching him. Thinking about the question. “I don’t know,” she says at last. “Try it.”

So Kanan holds her gaze, steady and intent. Pushes himself forward a little more, until he’s on his hands and knees over her. “Please,” he says: and his voice is deep and rough and utterly sincere.

Her eyes narrow, but she doesn’t otherwise move. “Strip,” she commands.

He doesn’t take his eyes away from hers. Just shifts his weight slightly onto his left hand, so that with his right he can unbuckle his belt. He pulls it free and drops it to the side of the bunk, never breaking his gaze.

Then he reaches back to tug up his shirts. He has to duck his head in order to pull them loose, but he goes right back to staring her in the eyes as he pulls them off one arm, then the other, and flings them aside. If she has _any_ doubt about the lengths he’ll go to for her sake…

He takes off his gloves with his teeth.

“Kiss me,” Hera says as soon as he unsnaps his pants, so he crawls the short remaining distance and presses his mouth against hers in a hungry, urgent kiss.

She kisses him back, just as forceful and just as greedy. But when he starts exploring her mouth with his tongue, she breaks away.

“Here,” she says, running a finger along her throat. So he kisses her there, hard enough to leave a mark.

“Here,” she breathes, fingering the end of her tchin. He takes it into his mouth, swirling his tongue around the tip, then swallowing it as deeply as he can. She gasps as he sucks more and more of the length into his throat. Well, chalk up one victory for his misspent youth: Kanan’s very good at pushing his gag reflex aside.

“I—” she pants. “I didn’t know you could do that.” He doesn’t answer, because his mouth is full. At this point it’s really about how long he can go without breathing.

But after just a few seconds she says: “Here,” running a palm over her chest. So he pulls back slowly, licking the length of her tchin as he withdraws. And then he undresses her carefully, pressing little kisses into her skin with each button he opens.

He nuzzles her breasts, licking delicately at the tips, and then sucking them firmly into his mouth. He’s moved from one to the other and back again when she puts a hand at the back of his head and says: “Kanan.” And not in a gasping-his-name-in-ecstasy kind of way: more in a blast-it-the-starboard-power-converter-is-sparking-again kind of way.

He looks up. Her expression is…tense, but open. “This isn’t really working for me,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s a little much.” He pulls himself up to sit beside her, and she shifts over to make room. “Want to try something else?”

“How about just…watching a holo?”

Kanan looks three steps into the future, and he sees a cheesy rom-com with a mistaken identity subplot. Messages that go astray, and Hera screeching into his ear: “Just TALK to him! Why don’t these people TALK to each other!” He’ll put his arm around her shoulder, and before the end of it she’ll be asleep, her slack mouth leaving a small wet spot in the fabric of his overshirt.

It sounds like a great plan to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't find it now, but this fic was influenced by a smart meta I read on Tumblr, all about how Kanan is a tactical thinker while Hera is a strategic one. Does anybody have that link?
> 
> Also, the rom-com is a shoutout to CC.


	6. Blood Sisters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unlike the other chapters in this series, this one isn't about Kanan and Hera at all. It's also not smutty. It's a gen-rated chapter that centers on Ketsu and Sabine.

There’s a certain majesty to Garel, with its towering mesas and sprawling urban cities. It’s close enough to Lothal that the two planets share a lot of cultural influences, but Sabine finds Garel more cosmopolitan. Certainly the art scene is better.

But the meeting spot Ketsu sent her isn’t easy to find. It’s in the alien quarter, where the streets are narrower and signage infrequent. When she gets close enough to the coordinates, Sabine parks her speeder and proceeds on foot. She can use her visor to project a grid overlay onto the warren of twisting streets. The corners are crooked and the alleys don’t line up, but step by step she gets closer to her goal.

She’s on her guard, too, because this kind of hemmed-in urban environment would make a great—well, awful—place for an ambush. She _wants_ to trust Ketsu, to heal that old wound. Sabine herself was the one to suggest that Ketsu might work more closely with the rebels. At the same time, though, she hasn’t forgotten that the Empire has a bounty on her head now.

It'd make a tidy sum of credits. Or so she’s told.

Nor has she forgotten that Ketsu actually tried to take that shot, when it was just the two of them facing off out in the black. She wants to trust. It doesn’t mean that she _does_.

And yet—she didn’t tell Hera or Kanan where she was going. Just that she was taking a night out in the city.

So she scans her six as she’s watching. Looks closely into the faces of the people she passes. Most of them just seem busy, and maybe tired—it’s mostly Rodians and Ortolans, with a minority of Kubaz and a few individuals of rarer species making their way to their homes after a long day’s work. Sabine’s not the only human on these streets, but she’s one of the few.

Nothing gives her cause for alarm. These are just ordinary people. If anything, they’re a little annoyed that she keeps slowing down to look around. They’ve got families to get back to.

She’s very close to her destination. In fact—she’s on top of it. The red targeting dot on her visor lines up perfectly with the gray triangle of her current position. But Sabine, turning cautiously in a 360-degree circle, doesn’t see Ketsu. Or anything that looks remotely like a meeting point.

MEET ME HERE, Ketsu’s message said. With coordinates, and a time. But all that Sabine sees are dingy single-family habitats pressed tightly together, and a few taller buildings for the communal species. The street arches slightly to accommodate a sewer drain running beneath ground level. There’s nothing. And Ketsu’s not here.

Sabine taps her helmet, but the display doesn’t adjust. Red dot. Grey triangle. This is it.

She takes another look at the sewer drain. Walks to the edge of the street, and jumps down into the gulch. It’s dry, and there’s no water marks to indicate that runoff flows through here with any regularity. There’s a grate that seals off the sewer access, and it looks rusted—but when Sabine gives it an experimental tug, it swings open easily on well-oiled hinges.

She has to duck to walk inside. Only a few half-crouching paces into the sewer access, and: “Hah,” she breathes. There’s a branching tunnel leading off to the right. And affixed to the duracrete just inside the opening: a small, intermittently blinking illuminated sign that reads HERE.

Sabine follows the side corridor, still hunched over to clear the low ceiling. The sign only casts a small circle of light, and after that it’s completely black. Sabine switches her visual band up to maximum amplification and walks into the dark.

Her aural sensors are picking up some input now. It’s distant enough that she wouldn’t be able to hear it unassisted, but her helmet is getting enough fidelity to analyze the sound patterns. Organic voices, and below them a beat that’s both staccato and yet somehow coherent. As she makes her way down the tunnel Sabine separates out the voices from the bass line, and boosts what she now recognizes as music in her ears. It’s _interesting_.

Fortunately she’s not paying so much attention to the rhythm that she doesn’t notice when the corridor drops into a flight of stairs. She starts down, one stair and then the next—

And suddenly light and sound explode all around her, _much_ too bright, _much_ too loud—she yells in surprise and pain and snatches the helmet off her head.

Everything recedes. Sabine’s panting, curled over the helmet that she’s clutched to her stomach. Sound and lights surround her. Somewhere nearby, someone’s laughing—

“No, no, she’s with me. I got her.”

Ketsu. Sabine raises her head and forces her eyes to open.

That narrow, cramped sewer passage opened up into a vast underground vault. And there were bafflers at the bottom of the stairs—that’s why all this sound and light can’t be seen from outside, and why as soon as she crossed the threshold Sabine’s own tech nearly blinded and deafened her.

Ketsu lays a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, ‘Bine. You got here.”

“That’s what the sign said,” Sabine manages. Ketsu’s very close to her now, and she’s wearing civvie clothes—some kind of asymmetrical tunic, draped long on one arm and bare on the other, and tight leggings that reflect back glittering colors in the multihued light.

There’s a lot of people here, talking, laughing, dancing, and the music surrounds everything. It kind of reminds Sabine of some of the Garel-native forms she’s heard in the marketplaces. But, like, run through a quasar scrambler and then painstakingly reassembled—by someone who’s carrying a real chip on their shoulder. The best way she could describe it is _aggressively half-familiar_. Whenever it gets too recognizable, it shreds up. Whenever it gets too random, it starts to cohere.

There are lights, too. Colors, searchlights, strobes. Melting, melding—the lighting is obviously responding to the sound, probably in a mechanical way, but the more she watches it the more Sabine’s not sure. The shifts in color are much more gentle than the shifts in tonality. It’s almost like they…make sense of the music. Smooth it out. It’s possible that they have a live, organic person in charge of those lights.

Ketsu’s watching, a little smile playing on her lips, as Sabine takes in the whole place. “Buy me a drink?” Ketsu suggests at last.

“All right,” Sabine says. She’s caught her breath, now. Ketsu arranged this meeting: she must have some reason for it. But if she wants to circle around first, then Sabine’s willing to waltz. “I remember what you like.”

“Do you?” Ketsu says, and a stray beam of light glitters in her violet eyes.

Oh, Sabine remembers perfectly. Ketsu liked close calls and long nights. Stolen kisses. Big booms and dangerous dreams. “We’ll see, won’t we?” Sabine says lightly, and turns toward what she’s identified as the bar. The crowd is thick, but the music is getting into her pulse. And if she moves in time with it, she can thread her way through the dancers pretty easily.

She’s carrying five different pieces of identification, all listing different names and different dates of birth. She’s not asked for any of them. She buys two cometdusters and pays in the system-local coinage.

“I think I like this place,” Sabine tells Ketsu as she hands over her drink.

Ketsu knocks back a slug. “I thought you would.”

Sabine takes a deep sip of her own drink. She doesn’t really like the taste of alcohol, but the cometduster has enough fruit juice that it mostly just tastes sweet. And the colors are pretty. “So what did you want to tell me, Ketsu?” she says at last.

Ketsu raises an eyebrow. “I wanted to tell you to meet me here,” she says. “Obviously you got my message, so…?”

“I _mean_ ,” Sabine huffs, “why are we meeting? Do you have—” She breaks off to give a quick look around. There’s nobody close enough to be listening in: the music is loud enough to smother their conversation, and the bafflers will defeat any snooping devices. “Do you have information for us?”

Ketsu tilts her head. “That depends. Do you want to dance?”

“Your information depends on whether I want to _dance_?” Sabine asks, disbelieving. If Ketsu’s jerking her around, she’s going to…well. She’s not going to stick around for it, that’s for sure.

“More or less,” Ketsu says, and raises her drink again. “Because the purpose of this meeting is to dance. That’s kind of all I’ve got.”

Sabine blinks. Then: “Ketsu.”

Ketsu looks back over her glass. Everything about her is warm colors, interesting lines, and the presentiment of danger. All the best things in the galaxy.

“Is this a date?”

“That depends,” Ketsu says again. Her voice is still neutral, and Sabine is really starting to lose her patience.

“On _what_?” Sabine demands.

Ketsu smiles slowly. “On whether you want to dance.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So far I've written one other Ketsu/Sabine story--"[Heart's Blood](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6402721)," about their relationship before Sabine ever met the other Spectres. For more Sabine-centric fic I'd recommend [Tetraptych](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5230604) by MementoVivere.


	7. Stealth Strike

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for mention of torture.

Turnabout is fair play, maybe. Hera certainly hadn’t been happy when Kanan volunteered her for the Shantipole mission. _He’s_ not a bit happy when she orders him to infiltrate the Empire’s gravity-well prototype and rescue Ezra and Sato—with Rex.

“Rex’s military experience will be invaluable,” she argues. “And he can also impersonate a stormtrooper.”

“Right!” Kanan drawls sarcastically. “That’s because he _is_ a stormtrooper.” This is not a winning argument, and he knows it: Hera has her captain voice on. In the end he’s going to have to do as she says. He’s just…gonna kick up a little dust about it, first.

“No,” she says, laying a hand on his shoulder. Kanan is not mollified. “He was a clone trooper.”

“Same thing!” Kanan snaps.

“Kanan,” she says, soft and urgent. This is not her captain voice anymore. “ _I_ sent Ezra. This is the only way.”

Kanan’s not actually afraid for Ezra. He used to worry a lot more, when the kid got himself into a scrape, but that’s been replaced with a growing confidence in Ezra’s skills. It seems most of the galaxy has forgotten what a lone Jedi can do. Maybe Kanan forgot himself, until Ezra came along to discover it all again.

But he looks down at Hera and thinks of the night, not too long ago, when he woke in a blind panic—feeling only her terror. He’d called his lightsaber to his hand and ran to her, racing down the passageway in his underwear. But it was only a nightmare. Her fear and her guilt, because she’d assigned the mission that put Sabine and Ezra in the hands of Inquisitors. She’d sent them, unknowingly, into danger: and in her mind any harm that came to them would be her fault. He’d _felt_ her despair.

“All right,” he says. “We’ll get ‘em back. All of them.”

And he does. All of them. Ezra’s fine, just like Kanan figured he would be, but Rex gets himself captured following a stubborn, aggravating, _useless_ impulse to self-sacrifice. It seems to Kanan that Rex is trying to throw his life away every chance he gets. Stars, how did he even survive the war?

( _He followed the Jedi then_ , Kanan’s inner voice answers. _He fought with brothers. Now he thinks he’s doing this alone._ )

Then he feels Rex’s agony through the Force. It reverberates through his mind and body and memories. Suffering torture, helpless and alone: he won’t allow it. Not to one of his own people.

Not to a friend.

When he does find Rex, the sadist in charge is trying to tell him that his death will be meaningless. That no one would notice, or care. “I will,” Kanan snarls, and blasts the torture droid into slag. Then he comes for the torturers. In the short space of time remaining to them, they’ll learn what a Jedi can do.

When he kills them it’s not in anger and not for vengeance. It’s out of necessity. But Kanan doesn’t exactly regret the loss of life the way he knows that he should.

Rex punches down the last of the stormtroopers and tries to say something quippy, even though his voice breaks on the words. They’ve worked him over pretty thoroughly already; Kanan doubts he’ll even be able to walk far without assistance. But Kanan remembers this too, this need to pretend it was no big deal. To beat it back; to assert control. He answers in kind and offers a shoulder without any further comment.

There’s some more of the normal shenanigans—escape pods, insubordinate droids, exploding ships, the usual. He leaves Rex on the _Liberator_ , with a salute. At this rate he’s actually gonna get _good_ at saluting. Better watch out for that.

When he crosses over back to the Ghost, he passes the open hatch to the mess deck, and Sabine and Zeb snicker in unison at his stormtrooper disguise. “You know,” Zeb says, “I think he’s starting to like that armor.”

“He sure ends up wearing it a lot,” Sabine laughs.

“Simmer down,” Kanan growls, but as he turns down the passageway to the cockpit they’re still at it behind him.

Zeb’s amused rumble: “Isn’t he a little tall for a stormtrooper?”

And Sabine: “That haircut’s definitely not regulation.”

The hatch to the cockpit closes behind him, mercifully shutting those two out. Hera smiles at him over her shoulder. She’s not actually flying—the _Ghost_ is still docked up with the _Liberator_. She’s checking some console read-outs. “You’re back.”

“Everybody’s back,” he tells her, and sinks into the co-pilot chair.

“ _Thank_ you,” she says simply.

“Ezra shot me, Rex tried to get himself killed for me—again—and this armor has been pinching my balls all day. You’re welcome.”

“Ezra _shot_ you?” Her expression is half-aghast and half-amused.

“Yeah. Kid’s got pretty decent aim, actually.” With considerable irritation, he grumbles: “Guess those lessons with Rex weren’t useless.”

“Mm,” she says. “Sounds like you and Rex figured out how to work together.”

“We can trust him,” Kanan says quietly. “Don’t send him out on any jobs for a little while, though. He took a beating in there.”

“Noted,” Hera says, her voice gentle. “You and Ezra?”

“We’re in good shape. You got another mission for us already?”

But she shakes her head. “Nope. Just checking in.”

“Then I’m going to peel off this blasted armor,” he says, standing and heading for the hatch.

Her voice follows him, rich with amusement. “Do you need medical attention for the…pinching?”

So he turns back, eyebrows climbing. “Need’s a strong word,” he says. “But I’m not gonna turn down your _attentions_.”

“I’ll meet you in your quarters,” she says. “Just as soon as this diagnostic finishes.”

Well. That’s an unexpected bonus. The stormtrooper armor grows even more uncomfortable as Kanan heads back to his bunk, thinking about undressing Hera. Blast, that’s tight. Maybe it was designed that way—to keep the troopers’ minds from wandering?

He’s still amped up from the mission. He usually needs some cool-down time after combat—stretches, meditation, very often a solo physical release. Cooling down with Hera is even better. He wonders what she might be in the mood for.

Peeling off the armor makes him sigh in relief. He’s naked and wiping down with a towel when Hera comes in. “Sorry,” he offers. “I’m still sweaty from the fights. I could shower?”

“It’s very, very much not a problem,” she says, and walks over to slide her palm over the muscles of his back.

He drops the towel and turns to gather her into his arms. They kiss, a brief and tender touch. Then Hera draws back. “Have I ever told you that I like watching you fight?”

He’s had some idea, honestly. She often finds some reason to be in whatever part of the ship he’s using during combat practice. “Do you?” he says.

“Mm,” she says, and gives him another little nipping kiss. Her hands are skimming his hips now. “You’re a force of nature out there. You dominate the battlefield.”

He pulls her a little closer. Ducks his head down by her earcone, and pitches his voice rough and low: “You like me dominating?”

Her pulse flutters in her throat. “Sometimes,” she breathes.

Well, now he knows what she’s in the mood for.

Kanan’s been on both sides of the whips-and-chains game. He’s had lovers who wanted him collared and on his knees, and lovers who wanted to be tied up and flogged. He was happy to oblige either way—it was all the same to him, all about the rush of adrenaline and pleasure and the illusion of intimacy. The kinkier the set-up, the better it worked as a distraction.

He did a lot of different things with a lot of different people, and none of it filled the void in his soul.

But if Hera was excited by any of that, it would excite him too. He’s tried to tell her, over the years, that he’s more than happy to help her explore any secret desires she might harbor. What _he_ gets off on is being the one to make her last defenses fall. Being there with her in that secret, shared moment when she lets herself come undone. That’s his kink.

(Or—that and a couple of other things. Her voice in his ear whispering filthy words. The shocking contrast against her skin, when he comes on her stomach or thighs. Her hands. Her taste. The list is getting longer as he thinks about it.)

Hera doesn’t want to be tied up, though. What she likes is pretty mild as these things go. Every now and then she just wants him to be a little less careful with her, and a little more aggressive: to take instead of asking. Maybe throw her around some. Kanan gets the feeling that the fantasy, for her, is about driving him so wild with desire that he loses all self-control.

Which he tries to play along with, although the truth is that this kind of thing takes _more_ control, and he actually has to be much more careful than usual every step of the way. Hera has a lot of power over him, and he’d do just about anything she wants—but she’ll never be able to make him run the risk of really hurting her.

He can put a little edge into his voice, though, as he growls: “Then keep watching.”

He holds her gaze as he moves his hands to circle her gloved wrists, then draws them behind her back. One on top of the other, so that he can hold them pinned with the fingers of one hand. Her eyes widen in surprise, but she doesn’t resist. Now he can move the other hand to the back of her neck, and kiss her fiercely.

She responds with equal heat. He’s _so_ glad he got that armor off.

Time for her clothes to start going, too. He moves his free hand to her chin, unsnapping her cap with a sharp tug. He pauses just a moment to scan her face intently: lips parted and eyes darkened with desire, she’s waiting for his next move.

So he cups her chin in his hand—thumb along her jawline, other fingers curled around her opposite cheek. Now he can easily control the tilt of her head. He moves her where he wants her in order to gain access to her throat, her earcones, her lekku, and he presses hungry kisses into each in turn. She makes little noises of desire, her body taut against his, but she doesn’t move except as he directs her. At last he pulls off her cap entirely and casts it aside.

The rest of her clothing presents a greater challenge. On the one hand, it’s exciting whenever he gets to strip the flight suit away—to see her long, slender legs, the secret curve of her hips and breasts. On the other hand, the fastenings to her clothing are complicated and there’s a lot of them. And he’s supposed to be in control right now, so he doesn't want to break the mood by fumbling with them.

An idea comes to him. He thinks it’ll excite her if he can pull it off, but it’s delicate work and he’ll need to really concentrate. She probably isn’t going to want to look at him going all blank-faced, either.

So he tugs at her wrists, pushing at her shoulder at the same time to turn her around. Not with so much force that she couldn’t resist him if she wanted, but he makes it something a little stronger than a suggestion. It surprises her: she stumbles a bit as she goes where she’s led.

_This_ is the kind of thing that’s tricky. Surprises can be good, if they’re exciting and keep her energy and interest spiked. Or they can be bad, if it’s something that goes against the flow of what she wants and expects. And now he can’t see her face to judge her feelings.

Instead, he looks to her lekku. If they played with this sort of dynamic more often, they’d have code words that he could use to check in. They don’t—not for this, specifically—but they _do_ have a secret language. Or at least Hera does. When she’s upset, her lekku go stiff. When she’s apprehensive, the tips curl away from each other.

Now, they’re relaxed and leaning close together. And that’s a signal he’s come to associate with very good things.

He looses her wrists in order to draw both lekku through his palms—slowly, and gently. They shiver at his touch, and Hera makes a soft, small sound of gratitude. He strokes them again, and closes his eyes.

He can keep repeating the same motion with his hands while he puts his concentration elsewhere. Extends his awareness outward, finding everything that resonates with the Force. Hera comes into focus first, naturally, glowing like a star in his mind’s eye. After that he gets the exact location of his lightsaber, and then the general contours of the room.

He needs something more precise. Hera’s clothing—he knows it pretty well. He brings it into his focus, and finds the different pieces have different mental resonances. Her armor pieces are leather; they used to be alive. They have a distinct feel in the Force. And her shirt is woven of plant material—he can pick that out, too. The synthetic cloth of her flight suit is the hardest to get a read on. It doesn’t have even a residual Force signature of its own.

But it’s something that Hera wears every single day, and it has meaning to her. Her identity is bound up in her ship and her piloting skills, and the flight suit is the practical and symbolic icon of that identity. It resonates with _her_ energy.

Kanan tilts his head. Stills the caressing motion of his hands on her lekku, and twitches his fingers—there. He’s got it.

Once the understanding is there, the manipulation is easy. Another twitch of his fingers, and armor, shirt, and flight suit all come free of each other. Hera startles under his hands: her arms move apart, and she sucks in a breath of surprise as her clothing opens around her. It all hovers in the air a moment, then falls in a rush of fabric to the deck.

Kanan opens his eyes, feeling pretty smug. It’s a shame he can’t explain to her just how difficult that was. He feels he deserves a reward.

Which he takes by running his hands over her now-revealed body. Her skin is so smooth, the swell of her breasts so soft. She moans and relaxes back against him. And then she even moves her wrists back to the crossed position at the small of her back, where he’d left them. He’s impressed by her acquiescence, until she starts rubbing a palm against his cock. Then he has to swallow a breath of laughter, because _that’s_ Hera—as soon as he thinks he knows the rules of their game, she changes them.

He continues exploring and teasing her, even as her nimble hands drive him farther into need. She _is_ trying to see how far she can push him: he’s utterly sure of it when she starts writhing, grinding her ass back against him, at the same time that she whispers: “Kanan, love, I’m here and I’m yours and I want you. I’ve got your cock in my hands and I _want_ you.”

_Stars_. His blood is pounding beneath his skin. She definitely knows all his buttons.

He puts his hands on her shoulders, and pushes her—hard—toward the bunk. He’s prepared to catch her if she stumbles again, but she keeps her feet underneath her and lands with arms outstretched, palms flat against the cushions. Bent over in an extremely alluring fashion. He’s right behind her, to grab her hips and lift her fully into the bunk.

She twists, trying to face him. He lets her—guiding her movements, even forcefully, is one thing, but he’s pretty sure that actually restricting her from going where she wants would be bad. He follows her onto the bunk and settles his body over hers. She winds her arms around his neck and surges up to kiss him.

He has every intention of fucking her. But this is another careful part, because she’s pretty clearly spinning this fantasy where she’s giving him blanket permission to do whatever he wants with her, and that’s great, that’s hot—but it’s also not real. He still needs to make sure she’s actually ready for each new step as it happens. For instance, there’s no real question of trying for penetration right now: that only works if she’s come at least once, or if he’s spent some time finger-fucking her first.

And since the illusion here is that he’s so carried away by passion that he absolutely must have her immediately, he’s thinking that he should probably go for what’ll work without any prep. That means, basically, fucking her clenched thighs. Which is going to be _delightful_ and he’s very much looking forward to it.

And yet, he can’t just start humping away without any warning. He needs to check in with her—without asking for permission in a way that would spoil the role he’s playing. So. It’s a little tricky.

But not impossible.

Instead of asking, he just tells her. Stares intently into her eyes and says roughly: “Here’s the part where I hold you down and fuck your thighs. And I need a ‘yes.’”

“Yes,” she breathes. And she reaches down to guide him—but he catches her hand, gently enough, and moves it above her head. Their fingers lace together tightly.

Then he dips his head beside hers, cheek to cheek, letting her feel the heat of his breath on her earcones. He finds the right place, nudging himself into the soft skin between her legs. “Hera,” he breathes. “I need you.” He says it to further the fantasy—but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

“Yes,” she repeats, her hand clenching his. He slides his other arm beneath her, holding her tightly.

And then, because it’s what she wants—and he’s finally convinced that it’s safe—he drops the inner grip he’s held for all this time. The check he’s placed on his own desires. He takes what he wants from her, and he lets her see him unravel. She grinds up against him, meeting him with every thrust. Her fingernails are pressing half-moons into his knuckles. He comes with her name on his tongue, spilling himself against her skin.

After he recovers, he rolls aside just enough that he can touch her. She’s close too: it won’t take much. He pushes his fingers into her folds, teasing and caressing, and he kisses her shoulder and throat and the side of her tchin. She stiffens—trembles—cries out...

And Kanan, with no warning at all, thinks of Rex. Thinks of _himself_. Held down and screaming, watched by voracious eyes in their most helpless moments.

Hera doesn’t notice him flinch back—doesn’t notice the way he jerks his hand away from hers. She’s a little distracted. After a moment she curls into him, taking deep and shivering breaths.

Kanan’s breath is ragged too. “Hera,” he says at last.

“Mm.” Her voice is heavy and satiated.

“I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

She opens her eyes then, looking at him a little wonderingly. “Of course not.”

He doesn’t know how to explain it. And yet his pulse is still racing.

Hera lifts her head from the bunk, looking at him more closely. “What’s wrong?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing. Just tell me—” _Tell me you’re okay, tell me you enjoyed that, tell me you trust me, tell me you love me, tell me I am_ nothing _like them_ … “—tell me if you need anything.”

She scans his face. “Come here,” she says, and pulls his head down to her chest. He wraps his arms around her waist, closes his eyes, and breathes in the scent of her skin. Her fingers sweep over his hair, slowly and lightly, again and again.

At last he says: “They tortured Rex, before I got to him.”

Her hand pauses, then continues its gentle sweep over his hair. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs.

There’s nothing to say. He tightens his arms around her waist. She caresses his face. At least there’s this in the world, too: touching each other with care, and love, and to bring delight.

At least there’s this.


	8. The Future of the Force

“So the Inquisitors are hunting these children,” Hera says slowly. “To raise more Inquisitors?”

They’re circled up in the mess deck—Kanan, Hera, and Ahsoka. Ezra and the other crewmembers have taken the rescued infants to reunite with their caretakers and find berths on the _Liberator_. From there they’ll eventually be transferred to safe houses planetside.

“We can’t be certain,” Ahsoka answers. “That is only one possibility.”

“Whatever they want those kids for,” Kanan says, “it’s not gonna be good.”

“Agreed,” Ahsoka says calmly.

Hera’s thinking out loud. “But if the Inquisitors traced the children to their homes—are the safehouses going to remain safe?”

“We need to find that base,” Kanan says grimly.

Ahsoka’s eyes flick to him. “You wish to gather the children together? I think that may be…unwise.”

That seems to strike Kanan deeply. His eyebrows draw together sharply. Then he leans back, gaze going unfocused. He’s made some sort of leap of intuition that Hera can’t follow. After a moment he says, slowly: “What about the future? What responsibility do we have to train them?”

“Our focus should be safeguarding them in the present moment,” Ahsoka says with conviction. Then a small smile plays around the corners of her lips. “Always in motion, the future is. Or so I have been told.”

Kanan snorts. Whatever the joke is, Hera doesn’t get it. “You could train them,” he suggests. “Your skills are…” He lets loose a soft, admiring breath. “Amazing.”

“My training was more complete than yours,” Ahsoka says gently. “And my master was…exceptional.”

“So was mine,” Kanan replies. He doesn’t sound insulted, just serious. “My time with her was cut short. But I’m alive today because of Depa Billaba. And whatever I’m able to pass to Ezra, it comes from her.”

Hera’s surprised—talking about his past has always been difficult for Kanan. She’s rarely heard these names from his former life.

“Then her actions have shaped the galaxy profoundly,” Ahsoka says, and Kanan looks…not pleased, exactly, but maybe more at peace. She continues in her measured tones: “And will continue to do so. I cannot train these younglings, Kanan. I left the Jedi Order and I have no wish to rebuild it. You and Ezra are, to my knowledge, the sole inheritors of that legacy.”

Kanan visibly blanches. “That’s—no. I can’t. I’m not even—I can’t.”

He’s really flailing. Hera steps in. “They’re just babies. We don’t have to make this decision now.”

But they’re both looking at her. Ahsoka with calm interest, Kanan with barely concealed panic. Oh. Yes. The Jedi _did_ start training from infancy.

“We can’t take the babies.” There’s a note of raw appeal in Kanan’s voice, like he’s begging her to agree.

“Of _course_ we can’t take the babies!” Hera says promptly. “For one thing, I’m sure their caregivers would have something to say about that.”

But Kanan still looks wretched. “That’s not the issue,” he says.

“If it was truly the best thing for them,” Ahsoka chimes in, “the families would agree. Mine did.”

“Mine did too,” Kanan says.

Hera shakes her head. “No. _No_.” They’ve had this conversation, five years ago, before Hera ever brought Kanan into her bed. The risks of conception would be small to begin with for them, and vanishingly so since they’re both on the strip, but it’s not an impossibility. They talked about contingencies. Hera thinks she would probably choose to end a pregnancy as soon as possible, but if for whatever reason she did carry a child to term, it would find a home with her extended family on Ryloth. She’s fighting on the front lines of a war; she can’t possibly care for an infant. “There’s no place here for a baby. That’s not an option.”

“Babies,” Kanan says grimly. “Two so far. Maybe more.”

Hera leans forward to lay a gloved hand on his arm. “We _can’t_ , love.” He needs to absolve himself of this burden. “They will truly be better with their families for now. You’ve proved with Ezra that it’s not impossible to start training an older child.”

“My master, also,” Ahsoka comments, “began his training much later than most. And he was quite powerful.”

“We all knew Skywalker’s exploits,” Kanan says. It looks like he’s relaxing.

“Keep them safe for now,” Hera repeats. “You can start their training later.”

Kanan nods. “If _they_ choose to follow that path.”

“Then we are agreed,” Ahsoka says, and stands. “I will seek more insight into the movements of these Inquisitors. If we learn of other children in peril, we will intervene.”

“And the ones that we rescue,” Hera says, “we’ll send to scattered safehouses, along with their families. And we’ll keep an eye on them.”

Kanan gives another slow nod. “Sounds like the best plan we can make right now.”

Ahsoka pauses, briefly, to lay a hand on Kanan’s shoulder as she leaves. He glances up: something unspoken seems to pass between them. Then she walks on, and the hatch opens and closes behind her.

Kanan lets out a long, slow breath, and slumps forward. His arms are folded against the table, his head buried in them. Hera runs her fingers through his hair, pulling it loose.

Kanan raises his face just enough to give her a sidelong, significant glance. Hera smiles in answer: it’s true that, generally, when she starts playing with his hair it’s because she has amorous intentions. But right now she only wants to give comfort. She strokes her fingers through his hair again, steady and reassuring, and he relaxes again.

“You did well today,” she says.

“Glad I didn’t end up with two more padawans,” he mutters into his arms. “One is plenty.”

Hera had gotten a chance to make faces at the babies, before they left. She’d noticed the way Kanan flinched back when they were passed around for goodbyes. “You barely know which end of a baby is up,” she teases.

“You’re good with them, though,” he says, his voice still muffled.

 _Well, of course_ , she thinks. Childcare on Ryloth is communal: everyone takes their turn doing the bouncy walk with a fussy baby. It seems the Jedi did things differently, raising their younglings in small groups of agemates. From what Kanan’s said, his caregivers rotated frequently until he was paired with his master. Privately, Hera’s sorry for him—she can’t even imagine growing up without aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents, and never knowing the sweet, trusting weight of a sleeping baby on his shoulder. But he wouldn’t want to hear that. So she just threads her fingers through his hair and says: “I’m glad to see you’re talking more with Ahsoka. She probably understands you in a way no one else can.”

He lifts his head all the way, then, seaglass eyes intent on her face. “ _You_ understand me in a way no one else can.”

“No, I’m not jealous,” Hera protests. “I meant what I said. There’s…so few of you left who shared that way of life.”

Kanan’s face turns grave. “I understand why you placed your trust in her,” he says. “I trust her too. She saved our lives today.” Then he wraps an arm around Hera’s shoulders, drawing her closer. “But I meant what _I_ said too.”

He leans in to kiss her. She lifts her face to meet him. His arm around her is warm, his mouth on hers tender and assured. She runs her fingers through his hair again, and this time her motives are less pure. “Sleep with me tonight?” she murmurs against his mouth.

“Mm-hmm,” he agrees, still pursuing their kiss. Then he draws back to say: “I want to check in with Ezra before he turns in. Then I’ll join you.”

She has time to wash and change into her thermal sleepwear before he comes to her quarters. She’s reading in bed, the lights pleasantly soft and dim, when the hatch opens. Kanan’s wearing his soft, low-slung pants, and his hair is still loose. Hera lays the datapad aside and shifts over on the bunk.

Kanan settles in beside her, running a hand over the curve of her hip. She slides her own palm over his chest and up his shoulder and neck, then pulls him in for a kiss.

For many long minutes they lie there, kissing and caressing each other without any urgency, simply enjoying the closeness of their bodies pressed together. Then Kanan says: “You know what I haven’t seen for a while? Your gizmo.”

“The massager?”

“Riiiiiight. That’s what you called it.” Kanan’s voice is drily amused, and Hera feels her face heat.

“That’s what it was called in the store!” This memory is still embarrassing.

 _It was almost a year after Kanan came aboard—thankfully before any of the others did. The_ gizmo _had a central area that could project coolness or heat, and three squat legs, each of which could expand or retract into flexible lengths and which vibrated at different speeds. It had been marketed as a “personal medical device for relieving stiffness and aches in the neck, back, and other areas,” and Hera had bought it because her neck tended to cramp up after a long shift in the cockpit._

_She was trying the thing out—and frankly feeling a little disappointed in its performance—when Kanan had walked in behind her and immediately had a coughing fit. She’d looked back at him, honestly perplexed, and that’s when he’d coughed out: “Uh, Hera? Why are you rubbing a sex toy on your neck?”_

_“What? It’s a neck massager!”_

_“Nooooo,” he’d drawled, “That’s some kind of three-armed vibrating dildo. Look.” He’d taken it from her hand and dialed out the legs to their full extension. “These two are designed for simultaneous anal and vaginal penetration. This one is supposed to hit your clit.” He’d coughed again. “If you—I don’t even—I, uh, think it’s designed for humans.”_

_“It was labeled,” Hera said with as much dignity as she could muster, “as a personal medical device for relieving stiffness. Of the neck and back.” And then some guilty impulse toward honesty had made her add: “And other areas,” and that’s when Kanan stopped trying to swallow his laughter._

_“Give me back my poorly designed_ neck massager _,” she’d snapped as he laughed. “I paid twenty credits for this piece of junk and I’m going to get some use out of it.”_

_He’d handed it back, still chuckling, and she’d retracted the legs back to their initial squat positions, glaring at Kanan the whole time._

_“You’ve got pain in your neck?” He sounded a little contrite. “Other than me, I mean.”_

_“Both kinds of pain are an occupational hazard,” she’d said, still glaring._

_“Here. Let me.” He’d stepped behind her then, and laid one of his hands on the back of her neck. She’d become immediately acutely aware of a number of things: how close he was, how tall he was, how broad and strong his hands were, the leather of his gloves and the warmth of his fingers bare against her skin. Kanan had gotten much better, over the months, at dealing with his obvious sexual interest. She’d gotten much worse at dealing with hers._

_Then he’d started kneading her skin, and she stopped thinking about any of that. It was sheer relief, waves of solace for her sore muscles radiating out from his touch. She relaxed into it, sighing with enjoyment. And he’d worked on her steadily and without any unnecessary quips or jokes, massaging her neck and shoulders and upper back until all the aches were gone. And then she’d thanked him, and he’d quietly left to go do something else._

_For a long time afterwards she’d thought about that moment. About how steady his hands were, and how good at finding just the right spots. The time and the focus that he was willing to spend on her physical wellbeing. Sometimes she thought about all that while getting her twenty credit’s worth out of the massager. It didn’t work well for the neck and back, but it did a pretty good job for the_ other areas _._

“Well, what happened to it?” Kanan asks.

“It’s in the bottom drawer,” Hera tells him.

“You got tired of it?”

“Mm, for a while,” she says. “You can pull it out if you want.”

So he rolls over, reaching down. She hears the drawer open and shut. Then he’s back, smiling a little, her massager in the palm of one hand.

She pulls him in for another kiss, then runs her hand down the hard muscles of his arm. His body is angled over hers, his hair sweeping against the side of her face as he kisses her. He lays the massager down on the edge of the bunk and pulls at the ties of her sleep clothes. When he’s got them open he starts dropping kisses down her body.

He spends some time licking and sucking at her breasts while she tangles her fingers in his hair and moans his name. Then she lifts her hips to help him peel off her thermal leggings.

When he reaches for the massager she says: “Come here,” and tugs him back down beside her so that she can slip a hand inside his pants. He gives a low groan as she wraps her fingers around his cock.

At the same time, he’s adjusting some settings on the gizmo. She hears the whirring of its gears as it starts up. Then he presses it against her—just one of the legs, the slimmest one with the most gentle vibration. He moves it in slow circles over her folds, and waves of pleasure begin to wash over her. He’s got the warmth setting on too, intensifying the sense of heat at her core.

She works at him with her hand, rubbing his foreskin back and forth over the head. He works at her with the massager. Soon the sensations reach an almost unendurable crescendo—she turns her head into his shoulder, stifling her cries with his skin. Her hips are bucking helplessly. Then he goes still: “Hera,” he moans, and she feels him shuddering against her, feels his come splashing onto her hand. She presses a kiss into his shoulder and holds her grip steady until at last he relaxes.

He rolls away for a moment, leaving a sudden chill and ache of absence where the massager had been. Another drawer opens: he’s getting a sanitary wipe. Then he’s back, smiling down at her at tenderly as he takes her hand in his own and cleans it. It’s the work of only a few seconds, but Hera—left dissatisfied at the brink of release—hisses, “Priorities, Kanan.”

“Don’t worry,” he says, his head dipping close to hers. He kisses her, and she hears the whirring of the device starting up again. Its heat envelops her a moment before the vibrations hit her again, stronger this time. “Mine are in order.”

He moves his hand, and she feels a pressure at her entrance—he’s slowly activating another of the extensions. He kisses her again, his tongue pushing into her mouth just as the gizmo penetrates her body. Warmth envelops her—the steady pulses of the vibrating arms sweep through her—Kanan is kissing her deeply—she is stretched and filled and when she comes it’s a back-arching, body-shaking spasm that goes on and on. Kanan has to press a hand over her mouth to stifle her scream.

He pulls the massager away as she slumps back to the bunk, boneless and satiated. She hears the drawer open and close. Then he’s back, pulling her into his arms. She curls into his warmth.

He’s so generous, and so good. He takes excellent care of her. Of everyone, really. He’d do whatever he thought the best thing for those kids was, no matter the personal cost to himself.

“Kanan,” she murmurs.

“Hmm?”

“You’re a good man.”

His arms tighten around her. “I’ve got my uses,” he says drily.

That isn’t what she meant, but it’s close enough, maybe. The universe has a _use_ for Kanan. And Hera needs him more than she can stand to think about: sometimes she tries to imagine what she’d do without him, and her throat closes up and her mind goes white.

“You do,” she says, pressing a little closer. “You truly do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hera's space vibrator, while infinitely more fancy and hi-tech, is based on an embarrassing experience I had with the [HoMedic Mini Massager](http://www.homedics.com/massage/handheld-massagers/mini-massager.html), which is pretty crappy as a back massager but works just fine as a vibrator. And once you realize what it's _actually designed for_ , the catalog copy becomes hilarious. "Four times the fun! With its quad massaging nodes, you can **relax tense areas** and revitalize your entire body. Treat yourself to a relaxing massage **anytime, anywhere** with this handheld massager. Don't be fooled by its size; this handheld massager does **wonders**." I mean...come on, guys! You could have just _told_ me what it was for.


	9. Legacy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is another gen-rated chapter.

Ezra sleeps fitfully in Ryder Azadi’s makeshift hut. Kanan keeps watch outside, watching the moons set and the sky turn gray in anticipation of dawn. There’s very little he can do to help his padawan now. He has no solace to offer beyond the assurance that he’ll be here, that he’ll continue to guard and guide Ezra as best he can. And whatever comfort the boy may have found in Kanan’s words, earlier:

“The Jedi teach that life doesn’t cease at death, but merely changes form in the Force. Your parents are alive inside you, Ezra. They will be—always.”

Kanan believes those words were true. He also knows how insufficient the same sentiment seemed to him after his master was gunned down. Whatever he carries of Depa Billaba inside himself, it’s no substitute for her gentle humor, her forthright honesty, her warmth and caring and vulnerability and bravery and living, breathing presence.

Ezra’s strength in the Force continues to grow rapidly. Perhaps too rapidly. His visions—that’s something Kanan has never experienced himself. He’s not envious. They seem to be as much a curse as a blessing.

Kanan does, occasionally, have particularly vivid dreams. He’s dreamed of Master Billaba many times. Sometimes he dreams of her as she was: old lessons, old memories echoing into the present. More rarely, he dreams of her as she might have been—streaks of silver in her black hair, lines of wisdom on her face. Too often, he dreams of her death.

He’d dreamed of her not long after they’d found Master Unduli’s remains. After Kanan had finally accepted that there wasn’t any better, wiser master to take over the task of Ezra’s training: come what may, Kanan was all the kid had, and he’d just have to make sure that was enough.

_In the dream, Kanan had been surprised that Master Billaba wasn’t as he remembered her. Her dark hair in its looped braids were the same, her far-seeing eyes and Chalactan piercings were the same._

_But she’d seemed so much…smaller._

_Her lips had twitched. That expression was perfectly, heartbreakingly familiar: the secret not-quite-a-smile that she’d often shared with him. “What is it, my padawan?” she’d asked him._  
  
_“You were never so,” He’d waved a hand, helplessly. Even in his dreams he was constantly wrong-footed. “Short.”_  
  
_“Don’t let Master Yoda hear you talking about height,” she’d advised. “Never hear the end of it, you will.”_  
  
_“ **He** was always short,” Kanan had protested. “But you—”_

_You were my bulwark, the shield in front of me and the strong column at my back. You were the still quiet center in every hurricane. You were the biggest thing in my life._

_“You always seemed taller,” he’d finished, lamely._  
  
_There was something in her expression he couldn’t quite place. A brightness in her eyes, that quiet smile tucked into the corners of her mouth, but it wasn’t amusement, it was…something else._  
  
_“And is that so strange?” she’d asked. “So unfathomable, to realize that you have surpassed the one you used to look up to?”_

_“Master Billaba, I could never—”_

_She had stepped forward to place her hands over his own. In the dream her touch was warm and dry. “You will teach the child,” she’d said, “and he will teach you. And if I have any blessing to give let it be this: may he surprise you, as you always surprised your master before you.”_

_And in the instant before he woke, Kanan realized: the thing that he was seeing in her face—her small, upraised face—was pride._

That was a good dream. Kanan has no idea whether it was anything more than a manufacture of his own mind, and he is content not to know. Life and death are one in the Force: he does believe that.

Now, into the thin first light of a new day, he says softly:

“Master Billaba, if any part of you can hear this—I just want you know you aren’t forgotten. You died so that I could survive, and, well…” He catches himself running his hand over his hair. “I guess that really did a number on me for a while. But I get it now. I’d do the same for Ezra, or Sabine. Any of them, really.”

After a moment, he amends: “Uh…maybe not Chopper.”

The wind picks up, whistling a thin, mournful song through the strange rounded rock formations so characteristic to Lothal. Kanan finds himself smiling. “Do you know the one lesson I think of most often? It was the first one you ever taught me. I’d heard the other younglings talking about you, calling you ‘damaged goods.’ And I didn’t know what to think about that, so I went to you and asked if it was true.

“And you said—you said— _I imagine the answer is yes_.”

The wind sings. Kanan lifts his face, letting the bracing chill of the air wash over him. “All the other Jedi Masters, they seemed so perfect. I wasn’t sure I could ever be as wise and as powerful as them. But you—you knew you weren’t perfect, and you did great things anyway. You lived with your failures and you kept going.

“Now I’m damaged goods. And Ezra is damaged. But I know that we can be true Jedi anyway, because you were the greatest one I’ve ever known.”

The sun has cracked the horizon. From the surrounding plains Kanan hears birdcalls, joining with and modulating the keening of the wind.

“And the last thing I wanted to tell you,” Kanan says quietly, “is that if you’ve been watching over me all this time, then maybe—you could look out for Ezra instead. He needs it more than me, and...” He swallows, voice suddenly growing thick. “And I think you’d like him.”

“Kanan?” He turns to see Ezra, his face drawn and haggard, standing in the doorway of the hut. “Who are you talking to?”

What Ezra needs now is stability. The reassurance that the routines of their lives will continue. Maybe something significant to put in the win column. What he _doesn’t_ need are Kanan’s ghosts added to his own.

“Myself, kid,” Kanan says. “Just myself.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I originally wrote up the story seed of Kanan's dream in response to a very cute Tumblr post by [joganpie](http://joganpie.tumblr.com/post/139933083914/worriedaboutmyfern-joganpie-i-really-want-kanan), and in return she created [this beautiful illustration](http://joganpie.tumblr.com/post/144412547989/this-is-for-ill-be-right-behind-you-but-more).


	10. A Princess on Lothal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My source for the Twi'leki in this chapter was [this fan-created dictionary](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1magdHIoVVfZ7TGyVTvhcT0gVy7L-SGajlJPBffZO9Qk/edit).

Three Alderaanian cruisers—however old—are a major coup for the rebel fleet. Despite their age, they’re in pretty good working order. But they need substantial upgrades. Their com systems are obsolete and don’t fully integrate with the fleet’s communications web. Their docking bays aren’t set up to launch starfighters. The engineering corps (“We have an engineering corps?” Kanan asks in surprise) is overwhelmed.

Hera offers to help coordinate renovations from the perspective of Phoenix Squadron’s needs, and ends up pulling back-to-back shifts for ten days running, working her way deeper and deeper into the bowels of the ships’ maintenance ducts. She emerges at more and more infrequent intervals, blackened with carbon residue, to stuff a meal bar in her mouth or to collapse on her bunk for a scant handful of hours before delving back into the excavations.

She loves the work (“Kanan! Can you believe they actually put in H-Stable power cells on top of the old ion drive system? The ion collection pods are disabled but they’re still there, and if we can bring them back to life and reroute their output we can use it to boost the shields!”) —but she’s literally disappearing in it. Kanan harbors a secret fear that she’ll fall into something down there and never be seen again. A mynock infestation, an electrical catastrophe…blast, those ships are _big_ and _old_ , for all he knows she’ll stumble on an entire Sith temple tucked between the gravity systems and the cooling vents.

And he misses her.

He’s been spending most of his time with Ezra, doing his best to be a steady and supportive presence as the kid comes to terms with his grief. Kanan proposes exercises that stretch them both physically and mentally, giving Ezra a way to vent his frustration and anger. They spend a lot of time in joint meditation. Kanan’s proud of Ezra—proud of the way he’s learning to accept his loss. The man Ezra is growing into will carry the memory of his parents with a sorrow that never fully fades, but one that gives him compassion and wisdom rather than bitterness and regret.

At the same time, Kanan feels Ezra’s grief like an unshakable weight on his own shoulders. And it’s heavy.

Ordinarily he’d look for solace in Hera’s arms. Their libidos don’t match up perfectly: Kanan would be more than happy to make sex a daily habit, whereas Hera usually takes a few days before she gets that speculative glint in her eyes again. So mostly, he lets her be the one to propose a night together. Or a stolen twenty minutes in the storage bay, as the case may be. But when he needs that connection and that affirmation, he goes to her—and he’s rarely turned away.

Now, though, she’s so deep in the retrofitting he barely sees her. When she does come back to the _Ghost,_ she’s exhausted. He can’t ask her for comfort.

On the eleventh day, he tells Ezra to take a day off—watch a holo, play dejarik with Zeb, see if Sabine wants any help with her projects. Just take some down time, a day of quiet. They both need one. And then Kanan decides to make himself scarce, because there’s a point when “present and supportive” turns into “hovering and suffocating,” and he feels like he’s getting pretty close to that line with Ezra.

Instead, he’ll see if he can’t help Hera with the retrofitting project. He thinks spending a day working alongside her would be good for his spirts. A little snark, a little banter; he’d just like to hear her voice.

Hera has been taking the _Phantom_ to and from the transports. Kanan has to cross over to the _Liberator_ and hang around for a ride. Fortunately, there’s a lot of traffic going back and forth. He catches the elbow of a weary-looking engineer stumbling out of a shuttle: “Hey, do you know which ship Hera’s on?” When she blinks back at him, he amends: “Captain Syndulla.”

“Oh! Yeah, she’s taking point on the power coupling de-link down in the _Queen Mazicia_. Engine levels.” Her last words are almost lost in a huge yawn. “You can com her from the bridge.”

“Thanks!” Kanan claps her on the shoulder, then pulls himself into the shuttle she and the other passengers just disembarked. “Are you heading back to the _Mazicia_?”

The pilot doesn’t turn around. “Soon as the flight clearance comes through.”

It ends up being Kanan and six other crewmembers in the shuttle. They’re all wearing uniforms, and they give Kanan and his civilian clothes a few curious looks: other than Hera, the Spectres aren’t well-known throughout the fleet. He gives them a nod, polite enough, and after a moment they nod back.

The passageways of the _Queen Mazicia_ are dimmer than the _Liberator_ : it looks like they’ve disabled the main power system and are running on backup. Most of the other shuttle passengers head up to the bridge. Kanan finds a working lift that will take him down.

Foot traffic on the upper decks was sparse, but the engine level is deserted. Several passageways intersect near the lift. “Hera?” Kanan calls, and hears his own voice echo back to him harshly.

He closes his eyes, looking for her in the Force. A steady, beckoning light blooms in his awareness. He opens his eyes, chooses a passageway and follows it. Every other one of the overhead lights is dark, creating staggered pools of illumination and darkness.

Then he hears her. Still in the distance, and weirdly distorted by the echoes of the empty ship: but he’d know her voice anywhere. It rises and falls in a lilting rhythm. She’s singing. He can’t quite catch the words, but the tune is slow and sweet.

Kanan gentles his steps as he walks forward. He doesn’t want the echo of his footfalls to cover the thread of her song—or to startle her into falling silent.

The passageway curves, and then he sees: an open maintenance hatch, and a ladder descending down. Hera’s voice comes much more clearly from its depths. Now he can make out the words:

_Arni'soyacho ayya, arni'soyacho ann  
arni'soyacho eswo eyan_

Kanan swings down onto the ladder, lowering himself carefully rung by rung. He’s trying to remember his Twi’leki. The melody sounds like a lullaby. Thank you star, thank you moon? Thank you… _eswo eyan_ he doesn’t know.

The ladder ends with a three-foot drop into a crawlway that stretches fore and aft. Kanan goes so far as to draw on the Force to ensure that his landing is soft.

And there she is, at the end of the crawlway: flat on her back with her torso swallowed by the unspooled guts of a power station. He can see her boots and the orange of her flight suit, and her tools spread out beside her. He’s still following the song: I’ll make a home in the stars, I’ll make a home in the moon / I’ll make a home in…there’s _eswo eyan_ again.

She trails off into humming. Kanan folds his legs beneath him, settling into a comfortable crouch. The crawlway is pretty cramped, but there’s enough room in the ladder well for him to sit upright. Maybe she’ll start singing again.

Instead, she curses. “Blasted piece of _poodoo_ …ugh, why’d they cheap out on the Czerka converters? Autowrench, where’s my autowrench…” She’s patting the deck beneath her, hand moving over her scattered tools.

Kanan ducks down, crawling the short space forward on his knees and elbows. He picks up the autowrench and places it in her gloved palm. “Here,” he says.

“Thanks,” she answers. Then she goes still. A second later he has to scoot back quickly, because she’s about to kick him in the face as she slides out from under the power station. Her face is smudged with soot. “Kanan? What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you,” he grins at her. “What’s _eswo eyan_?”

“Um…young beloved. It can be a child or a romantic partner.” She gives a little, embarrassed shake of her head. “How long were you listening?”

He backs up to the ladder well, so that he can sit up again. He ends with one leg stretched out, the other knee cocked up with his arm resting loosely over it. “Not long enough,” he says.

She slides closer, tucking her legs beneath her when she’s close enough to sit up too. Her knee rests on his foot, and her hip presses against his ankle. “How’s Ezra?” she asks.

“I gave him the day off. He needs it. _I_ need it.”

Her green eyes narrow slightly, running over his face. “Have you been sleeping?”

That makes him snort. “Have _you_?”

“Actually, yes! We have some cots set up, I just came off a nap.”

He nods. That’s good to hear. “I thought maybe I could help you,” he offers.

“Hnh,” she says slowly. “I have twelve of these stations that need manual decoupling, but—honestly I’d rather do it myself. When we flip the switch back to full power it wouldn’t be obvious right away if there was still a residual connection between the ion and H-stable power routings. I just…have to be sure.”

“Because you’re bringing the old ion drive back online,” Kanan says, thinking it out as he speaks. “And rerouting its power output from the engines to the shields.”

“Right. So if there was a slow leak from one system to the other, it wouldn’t really be noticeable—unless the engines were stressed. For instance, if the ship had to burn hard to avoid a hazard or escape a battle.”

Kanan completes her thought. “And then the shields might fail. At the worst possible moment.”

“Right!” She nods enthusiastically—maybe a little _too_ happily for someone contemplating a disaster scenario for a major transport ship. “So…this one’s number ten. Just two more, and the _Mazicia_ can power up again _.”_

“Gotcha,” he says. “Well, I could hand you tools? Make myself a little bit useful, anyway.”

Her eyes go soft. “How have things been on the _Ghost_? I’m sorry I haven’t been there much.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he says. “It’s been okay. Hard, but okay. I just…” He lets out a tight breath. “I just wanted to see you. I wanted to hear your voice.”

She watches him for another moment, then—with a quick, deft motion—pulls off her gloves. She reaches up to cup his cheek, her thumb sweeping over his skin.

He lays his own hand over hers. “Hera,” he says roughly, “will you sing that song again?”

She scoots forward, and that small motion is enough to put her in his lap. Her legs wind around him—one under his knee, one over his leg and curling behind his hip. Her hand is still on his face. “I’ll sing it for you in Basic,” she says, and then the hand on his cheek slides to the back of his neck, and she’s tugging him down.

He goes where he’s led. Rests his forehead against her shoulder and lets the rest of his body slump forward. He puts his arm around her and she sings, softly, into his ear:

 _Where are the stars, where is the moon_  
_Where is my own beloved one?_  
_thank you star, thank you moon_  
_thank you young beloved one_  
_I’ll make a home in the stars, I’ll make a home in the moon_  
_I’ll make a home in my well-loved one_

Her voice, as ever, is the most beautiful thing he’s ever heard. Each note, pitched just for him, hangs in the close air of the crawlway for a moment, then yields to the next. He closes his eyes and rests against her, listening to the lullaby.

Then he feels a warmth, an almost tickling rush of sensation: the tip of her tongue, tracing over his ear. Her breath stirs over his skin. She tugs his shirts loose and runs a bare palm up his back.

“Hera,” Kanan breathes, and she turns her face into his neck, kissing him softly and sweetly just under his jaw. He moves his hand to the back of her head, rubbing at her tchun where it emerges from her cap.

“Hera,” he says again. “Are you sure? I don’t need—”

“Shh,” she breathes against his skin. And then, with amusement in her voice: “Yes, I am. And yes, you _do_.”

She starts unbuckling his shoulder armor. He takes a deep breath, looses it again. Runs his fingers all the way down her tchun, rolling the tip of it between his fingers. She glances up at him with a heat kindling in her eyes, and pulls his armor aside.

He leans in to catch the side of her tchin in his open mouth, letting his tongue trace the whorls of her tattoos. He’s still playing with the end of her tchun, and her breath is starting to come fast and sharp. He pauses only when she pulls at his shirts, to help her draw them over his head.

He smiles, privately, when her focus turns next to his hair. But he’s already unsnapping her pilot’s cap, so. His hair drops loose around his face at the same time that her cap and goggles fall aside.

He kisses every part of her that he can reach—her tchun and tchin, her throat, her mouth. His hands are stroking her back and her lekku. She’s moving in his lap in an amazingly provocative fashion, stripping her own clothing away now that she’s bared him to the waist. Once her shirt is gone he leaves a line of tiny kisses on the curve of her neck and shoulder, humming her tune as he does so.

The close quarters restrain their movements, but he very much enjoys the roll of her hips against his as she works to get her knees under her again. Then she rises a little to push her flight suit down. He runs a palm up her side, cupping it under her breast, and leans forward to catch her nipple in his mouth. He licks and sucks at her; her fingers tangle in her hair and she makes low, panting moans.

At last she pushes firmly at his shoulders, guiding him back. He has to duck his head to avoid hitting it on the edge of the ladder well, and he ends up flat on his back, with her straddling him. She unbuckles his belt, then tugs at his pants.

It’s obvious what she going to do the moment before she does it, and the anticipation makes his cock twitch. Then her mouth closes around him, warm and wet. Her deft little tongue laps at the underside of his shaft. Kanan turns his head to the side and groans.

She wraps her fist around the base of his cock, settling into a rhythm. This will _definitely_ push him over the edge if she keeps it up. But—“Hera,” he says hoarsely. “Can you—come here?”

She lifts her head. “There’s not a lot of room,” she says dubiously. And it’s true—she’s kneeling in the ladder well, where she has some room to maneuver, but the rest of him is stretching into the aft crawlway.

“Turn around,” he suggests—and, with some careful balancing, she does. “Now, if you can—crawl back. On top of me.”

She makes a noise of understanding. His view now is one that he does not regret in the least as she backs up into the crawlspace. (Her boot hits him in the shoulder as she shimmies back, but that’s a small price to pay.) Her orange flight suit is hanging low on her hips already: all he has to do is reach up and tug it a little farther down, and then the firm, round swell of her ass and the intricate folds of her cunt are fully exposed, and right by his face. He pulls on her hips, guiding her down, and she settles over him.

He laps delicately at her, tasting her, and she makes a small soft sound in response. Then he feels her taking his cock into her mouth again. He turns his head just enough to ask: “Will this work?”

“Mm-hmm,” she says around his shaft.

The sight of her straddling him—the close view of her most secret areas—is incredibly arousing. The smell and the taste of her enfold him, just as the pressure and the heat of her mouth surround his cock. Kanan has to consciously exert some control over his own responses just to keep himself from peaking immediately. He tries to focus on what he’s doing with his tongue. Teasing and licking and driving into her, even as his hands wander over the curves of her hips and ass. No, that’s definitely not going to help him hold back. Karabast, she’s hotter than a hundred suns.

He focuses on his breathing, and that helps him stay steady as he explores her with his tongue, finding the spots that make her buck and grind against his face. Then she starts whimpering with pleasure, and the sound of it reverberates through him, and—

—And he pulls back just enough to gasp, “Hera, I’m—” but she just sucks at him more firmly and then pulses of white-hot pleasure flow through him, leaving relief behind.

As soon as his climax ends, he resumes his attention to Hera. But: “Kanan,” she pants. “It would be better for me if…”

“Make yourself comfortable,” he says immediately. “I’ll come to you.”

There’s another complicated (and enjoyable) dance of shifting bodies. She ends up stretched out in the fore crawlway, his shirts bundled beneath her head. He lowers himself on top of her and takes up his work where he left off. It’s easier from this direction: he can use his hands better. She tugs on his hair when she comes, and gasps his name.

Afterwards he rests his head on her stomach, feeling it rise and fall with her breath. She runs light fingers over his forehead and scalp, again and again. Some time later, she begins to sing.

It’s a new melody. Kanan listens carefully to the words, even though once again he can’t translate all of them. He doesn’t need to.

Hera has always been his guiding star and his bell in the fog. No matter what the words are about, she’s singing him home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now with art by Pornflakes!
> 
>  
> 
>  


	11. The Protector of Concord Dawn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a consolidation of several fics that I originally posted separately, after "The Protector of Concord Dawn" originally aired. In AO3′s structure, I couldn’t figure out a better way to move my those fics into a chapter of this series than to simply paste in a new chapter and delete the old postings. Unfortunately, this also has the effect of erasing people’s comments and bookmarks on the original stories, and I’m genuinely sorry for that. I just couldn’t come up with a better way of doing it. Apologies.

**DAY 1**

“I see her! I see her, Kanan, it’s bad!” The fear makes Sabine’s voice breathy, high-pitched, almost girlish: for a moment she’s forgotten to hide the child that she still is. “You’ve gotta hurry! Please hurry!”

Before the panic and the anger can swamp him Kanan closes his eyes, breathes deeply, and draws on the implacable current that flows through his core. It gives him the knowledge of what must be done in the present moment, and the strength to do it; everything else is stripped away.

Until there’s nothing left to be done.

Hera, unconscious, looks so small and so fragile on the operating table: her lips ashen, her face puffy and bruised. Kanan’s been this helpless before, but only once.

He could think about blaster fire and burning flesh and the lies we tell our loved ones when we need them to leave us behind. Instead, he thinks about sabacc.

The first rule of gambling (and it’s the reason Kanan’s never been able to make much of a profit at the sabacc table, not unless he cheats outrageously) is knowing when to fold. Only a fool plays the long game when the odds are stacked against you.

He and Hera have been rolling weighted dice for a long time now. Their lives are nothing but a long bad bet: opponents outside their weight class and races on the outside stretch. Again and again they’ve bluffed with losing hands and managed, if not to win, at least to earn back enough to ante up for another round. But he knows—they both know—that you can’t gamble with these odds and expect to keep the game going forever.

It was always going to end. And when it ended, it was always going to end exactly like this: ugly and hard. Kanan’s staring at the rest of his life without her and the worst part is that he’ll _do_ it.

He’s not going to hunt down her killers and go out in a blaze of glory. He’s going to keep living. He’s going to keep training Ezra, keep fighting the Empire, keep reaching in each moment for the knowledge of what must be done and the strength to do it. For all the grim and joyless march of time that may remain to him.

His soul shivers in the drag of her every shallow breath. He wants to pray but to what power? There is life and there is death and all of it is one in the Force. She and he are not more deserving than the others who have died this day. Those other pilots, the ones that didn’t make it back—Kanan doesn’t know their names, but he knows that Hera would.

It’s not about justice. Countless wise and powerful Masters died on the same day that silly little ineffectual Caleb Dume got a second chance. And for the next fourteen years Kanan did jack-all with the existence that someone as great as Depa Billaba died to give him. He knows very well there’s nothing fair about life and death. He's been trying to help Ezra grapple with the same hard truths.

And yet he watches Hera’s throat flutter with the effort of drawing air, and he bends every part of his will to tell her to do it again, just one more breath, just breathe.

He finds himself mirroring the droid’s movements. One hand hovering above her desperately still body, the other braced on the bed alongside her. _Breathe_ , he tells her. _Take anything from me, but breathe_.

It’s not just, but it’s allowable. In this moment it’s required. And he has the strength.

Again, and again. Each struggling, shallow breath a bad bet against odds that won’t hold. But she breathes. And she breathes.

And she breathes.

 

**DAY 3**

Hera makes a terrible invalid: impatient, ungrateful, and cranky as a nexu in confinement. Kanan, who already knew this about her, positions himself to bear the brunt of her ill temper. She’ll feel bad later if she snaps at one of the medical staff.

“We need to get these things off me,” she says, picking at the monitoring cuff strapped to her wrist. “I want to oversee the repairs to the Moonbeam.”

“Hera,” Kanan says, fond and exasperated. “You’re on bed rest for at least three more days. You’re not going anywhere.”

“I’m really doing much better. I’m sure I could walk.”

“ _Hera_.”

Her eyes narrow. “You don’t get to make the call here, Kanan Jarrus. I outrank you.” She jabs a finger at him for emphasis, then winces as the sudden motion jostles her torso.

“How about I go down to the hangar bay and holocomm you?” Kanan says placatingly. “You can give directions remotely.”

“It’s not the same,” she grouses. “Can’t see fine details over the holo. Besides, my vision’s still swimmy.”

He just stares back at her, eyes level and one brow cocked significantly, until she snaps: “Fine. At least bring me my datapad. I need to…I need to write letters of condolence for Suggs and Bowers. And I need to review the personal dossiers to figure out who we’ll transfer in to replace them.”

“You don’t need to do all of that right now,” he says. “You’re supposed to be _resting_.”

“How can I rest when there’s so much to do? I haven’t even looked at the daily intel reports, and who knows how many other briefings are in the backlog…”

He lays a gentle hand on top of hers. “Hera. The reports will keep.”

She glowers at him. “My work is important, Kanan! You could”—she breaks off, yawning—“you could have a little more appreciation for all my responsibilities…” Her eyes flutter. Kanan glances at the chronometer: she was awake for eighty minutes, this time. The longest stretch yet. “Lot of things to take care of,” Hera grumbles. “Should be more grateful.” Then she sighs, turns her head, and slips back into sleep.

He leans over, brushing his lips across an unbruised stretch of skin on her temple. “You have no idea,” he says softly, “how grateful I am.”

 

**DAY 8**

“I know what you’re doing,” Hera says as she walks—with the assistance of a hoverbrace—down the wide white corridors that will take them back to the Ghost.

“I’m not doing anything,” Kanan says mildly. He’s keeping pace just behind her right shoulder, watching her feet as she places them down. The medical droid didn’t want to release her yet, but Hera was growing so increasingly restless and irritable in the sickbay that further confinement would have clearly done more harm than good.

“I know, and you’re paying so much attention to _not_ doing it that I can actually feel it,” Hera snaps. “Like a tingle all around. I’m not going to fall.”

“No, you aren’t,” Kanan agrees. _Because I’ll catch you_. He leaves the second part unsaid, but she throws him a quick backward glance, eyes flashing, and he suspects she heard it anyway.

Once they cross over to the _Ghost_ she sighs, shoulders relaxing. It’s not that she can’t accept help: it’s just hard when it's being imposed on her. Back on her own ship, it’s different. She gives him a small smile and says, “Thank you, dear.”

“Better?” he asks.

“Much.” Then she turns to the small welcoming party. Sabine runs up with open arms while Ezra and Zeb hang back, but they all have the same shining relief in their eyes. Even Chopper gives a joyful whistle.

“I should sit down,” Hera admits without prompting, after the hugs have been exchanged. “I’m not quite back at full power yet.”

“Do you want to set up in the common room? Or in your cabin?” Kanan asks.

“Closer to the bunk is good,” she says. “The meds tend to make me fall asleep.”

They hit their first snag at the door to Hera’s cabin—the hatch is too narrow for her hoverbrace. Hera faces the setback calmly. “Zeb, would you stow this by the galley?”

Zeb’s almost bashfully eager to help. Kanan slides an arm around her, leaning down so that she can brace herself against his shoulder, and supports her as they cross the short space to her bunk. The hatch whooshes closed behind them.

He suspects she’d get cranky with him again if she realized how happy it makes him to be leaned on. Hera’s slow recovery is frustrating for her, and he’s sorry for that, but he’s just so grateful to have her back alive.

And he knows: the day will come that she’ll fly again. Dancing alone through enemy fire, kissing danger and courting risk, out in the vast void where he can’t do anything to protect her. On that day—he won’t try to hold her back. He’ll keep all his fears to himself.

But so long as she’s within his ability to guard her, then he has no fear at all. He holds her up, and they walk slowly across the room, and Kanan is simply and purely happy.

When she settles onto the bunk, he sinks down into a crouch beside her. “Need anything?” he says.

“Mmm,” she says, and shifts herself toward the wall. “Yes.” She pats the space she’s made beside her.

Kanan smiles—just a small, relaxed thing—and she smiles back. Her face is still bruised and discolored but so, so beautiful, especially with that sweet curve to her lips and a depth of affection and welcome in her brilliant green eyes. Kanan’s still smiling as he pulls off his boots.

They weren’t able to touch very much while she was in the medbay. Kanan split his time between her bedside and the _Ghost_ —she needed to know that things were continuing smoothly in her absence—and he barely slept, just meditated quietly during her periods of unconsciousness. They’d held hands, sometimes. He’d thought about climbing into the medical bed with her but rejected the idea as quickly as it came: he couldn’t risk jostling her injuries or confusing the scanners.

Now he gently lowers himself beside her, having left his armor, boots, gloves, overshirt, belt and holster in a neat pile beside the bunk. He slides one very careful arm beneath her shoulders and wraps the other around her waist. She leans her head against his chest and he closes his eyes, slowly exhaling. It’s so much. It’s everything.

They lie there for some time, warm and together and alive. The rhythm of their separate breaths syncs up and then drifts apart again. Hera moves her hand, sliding it beneath Kanan’s undershirt to feel his skin against her own. He kisses the top of her head—it’s bandaged and she probably can’t feel it, but she’ll be aware of the movement and she’ll know what it means.

She shifts, tilting up her chin, so he kisses her again—this time on the lips. It’s a gentle, tender touch. Her fingers trace little circles on his chest. And then a sudden, shocking tide of desire surges through him, speeding his heart and hardening his cock. His hips jerk involuntarily. This wasn’t what he intended, he’s almost appalled, but she’s _right here_ and he _wants_ her.

He swiftly clamps down on that reaction. Breaks off their kiss so that he can close his eyes, breathe deeply, slow his heartbeat and wall off the sensations of his body…

…except that she moves her hand, pulling it out from under his shirt and lifting it to the nape of his neck. She’s tugging his head back down, kissing him again, and this time she catches his lower lip between her teeth and flicks her tongue across it. His focus is lost. He tightens his grip on her waist, fingers splaying out, pulling her body against his own. She responds by pressing her hips against him and he can’t help but groan aloud.

“Hera,” he manages.

She pulls back, just enough to look him in the eyes. “Kanan?”

“Is this a good idea?”

She smiles again. This time it’s wicked. “You’re going to have to help me out of these hospital clothes sooner or later.”

He puts a hand on her cheek, moving his thumb very, very lightly across the bruises there. She doesn’t flinch. “We’ll stop if it’s too much.” It’s not a question.

But: “I’ll tell you,” she assures him.

“Ten credits says you’re going to fall asleep on me,” he teases.

“No promises,” she says. “Work fast, lover.”

He leans in, kissing the side of her mouth, her jaw, the soft skin of her neck. “No,” he says hoarsely, and sets about very slowly and very thoroughly reacquainting himself with every inch of her.

He strokes her tchun—gentle, gentle, just a palm skimming over her skin where it emerges from the bandages—and mouths her tchin, pressing delicate wet kisses all down the length of her lek. She gasps and shudders against him, clutching at the muscles of his arms. Her hips surge against him again—it hasn’t been so long, but he’s responding as if they’ve been apart for months. Suddenly he’s aware of all the tension, stress, fear and hope knotted up inside his body. He’s been running in crisis mode for some time now, and meditation only goes so far.

Still, he holds back. He lets her touch him wherever she wants, but he can’t allow himself to be fully aware of those sensations. Can’t think of what it would be like to settle over her, to drive himself against her soft and yielding body. Instead he carefully begins to unfasten her clothing, skimming his fingertips and his lips across the skin that’s revealed to him.

“Hera,” he breathes, nuzzling one green-tipped breast. She runs her fingers through his hair, loosening it from its binding. He’s been going through hair-ties at quite a rate ever since he started crewing on the _Ghost_.

The thought makes him huff with sudden laughter: “What’s so funny?” Hera asks, her voice rich and fond. Kanan lifts his head and grins down at her.

“I never used to go through hair-ties so fast,” he says.

“What, do you want reimbursement?” She lifts one delicately-tattooed eyebrow, her lips curving. “Do I not pay you enough, moonbeam?”

“You don’t pay me at all,” he points out, still grinning.

“Not since I gave you equal access to the accounts.” Hera’s voice is easy, but her eyes are tracing the fall of his hair around his face, and her pulse is beating in her throat, and below that her breasts are bared to his gaze. And he _wants_ her.

All his teasing drops away. “I’m not here for the money,” he says. “I’m here for you.”

She blinks, her own smile dying. Puts a hand against his face. And then they’re kissing, again, hard and urgent and graceless—teeth scraping, tongues driving together. Kissing as if it might be the last time.

Last time, it almost was.

She’s making small throaty noises. He’s matching her with his own low groans.

Then she flinches back, breath hissing between her teeth—and he freezes. But it wasn’t him, he’s been holding himself perfectly still.

It was her, lifting her hips to grind against his. She moved too hard, too suddenly. “I’m okay,” she gasps, “I’m fine.”

“I know,” he says, “I know.” Senseless as it is, it’s the most reassuring thing he can think to say. Her fingers are digging into his arms.

He holds her as her breathing steadies. Her grip relaxes. “Kanan,” she whispers. “Don’t go.”

“I won’t,” he says. “I’m right here.” He leans her back slowly, then kisses her again. Not as hard and driven as before, but with a slow, assured kind of tenderness. This _isn’t_ their last time. It’s their homecoming.

And all the throbbing need of his own body—he can only guess that she’s feeling something like it. He knows exactly how to help her, now.

So long as she’s within the circle of his arms he has no fear at all.

He returns his attention to her clothing, and this time he doesn’t stop until he’s unfastened and removed every piece. “Careful,” he whispers when she arches her back. And he doesn’t lean back over her, doesn’t kiss and taste her breasts, doesn’t run a firm hand between her thighs until she’s subsided back against the bunk.

“Kanan,” she breathes.

“I’m here,” he says again, and catches her nipple between his teeth. The next sound she makes has no proper syllables in it at all, and hearing it makes his cock twitch. He rubs his fingers between her legs in small, insistent circles and thinks—for the thousandth time—of how profoundly lucky he is. That of all the sentients in the galaxy _he’s_ the one who gets to be her lover. He’s the one who gets to see her unravel under his hands.

This is sacred. He was the galaxy’s worst Force-disciple when he met her and still he had enough awareness to surrender himself into her keeping immediately. What’s between them when everything else falls away is _sacred_ and he would give everything he has—everything he is—to protect it. His love for her reconnected him to the entire cosmos, to the Force, to the core of himself. In these moments the whole pattern makes sense to him.

Her hips are bucking beneath his touch. “Hera,” he says, his voice rough with desire. “You need to be still.”

“I need to touch you,” she pants.

So he pulls down the waistband of his pants, then kicks them off, and strips off his undershirt for good measure. Then he gathers her into his arms again. She’s warm and soft and naked across the length of him. She runs her hand down his chest, then wraps it around his cock, and his breath stutters.

“Hera—I won’t—I’m going to—”

“Going to what?” she says, her tone one of impossible, saccharine innocence.

“I’m on the edge already, I won’t last long if you keep doing that.”

“Do what?” she says, still wide-eyed and breathy. “Grab your cock and stroke it fast and hard? Maybe I want you to come for me. Maybe I’m thinking about how it tastes in my mouth, or how it feels when you’re driving into me…”

Kanan makes an inarticulate noise of surrender but she’s merciless, she just keeps whispering filthier and filthier things as her graceful little hand moves with complete assurance on his cock. His neck arches, face turned away as release overtakes him. It explodes from her touch, warm and sweet and _such a relief_ …tensions he hadn’t even let himself be aware of draining away in the surges of pleasure.

At last he turns back and kisses her again on the forehead. “You can barely walk but you can still twist me around your little finger,” he murmurs.

“I used all five fingers,” she says smugly, and he laughs as he leans out of the bunk to grab a wipe from the drawers below. After he’s cleaned up he turns back to her, angling himself over her—although he's resting on an elbow, not letting any of his weight settle onto her. He kisses her slowly and strokes a light hand over her body, again and again.

At first she responds with little hums of appreciation, then more throaty and heated moans. When he moves his mouth back to her tchin she whimpers in eagerness, and the sound is so arousing that Kanan has to clamp down again on his own response.

“I love you,” he murmurs, and swirls his tongue around the tip of her lek, then sucks it deeply into his mouth. At the same he leans into her so that, when her back arches involuntarily, he can keep her from moving too much. She sighs his name and relaxes again.

He parts her thighs, sliding one finger inside her, while his mouth continues working around her lek. Her hips buck but he’s able to keep her pinned. He adds another finger and his thumb seeks her most sensitive places: small circles, not too much pressure.

Hera's cries have become sharp and loud, though she’s trying to muffle them with the pillow. Kanan sucks harder on her tchin. He's greedy for it, he wants to suck down as much as his throat can hold—but she’s writhing so much that he’s afraid she’ll hurt herself again. He’s just about to pull back when she goes stiff, trembles, and gives a long, shuddering moan into the pillow.

He lies back against the bunk. She leans her head on his chest and he strokes her back gently. “Guess I owe you ten credits,” he says after a long moment. “You didn’t fall asleep after all.”

There’s no answer. “Hera?” Her breath rises and falls evenly. “You’re asleep, aren’t you.”

She shifts, curling up against him. “Shh,” she says muzzily. “’M tryin’ ta slee.”

Kanan smiles. After a moment he says again: “Hera.”

“Mmm.”

“Welcome home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For more "Protector of Concord Dawn" fic goodness, I'd recommend "[Damage Control](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5873773)" and "[Enjoy](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5902222)" by gondalsqueen.


	12. Legends of the Lasat

“Do you…understand what happened back there?” Hera overhears Ezra asking, as the _Ghost_ floats on the lip of Lira San’s gravity well. It’s a pretty system—the star gives off a soft, peachy light, which is picked up and diffused by clouds of interstellar gas. Zeb and the other two Lasats have already taken the _Phantom_ to explore the planet’s surface.

“Not really,” Kanan answers, his voice easy. “But it was a pretty big win for Zeb and his people. I’ll take it.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?” Ezra asks dubiously. “Not knowing what’s going on?”

“Kid,” Kanan says, “the longer you live, the more you get used to it. The Force works in mysterious ways.”

“Is there a kyber crystal inside Zeb’s bo rifle? How could it channel our Force energy?” Ezra’s almost tripping over his questions now. “And did you notice it was giving off beams of _yellow_ light? Its energy discharges have always been purple before!”

“Why are you asking me?” Kanan says. Hera picks up twin threads of amusement and exasperation in his voice. “I don’t know what’s inside Zeb’s bo rifle.”

“Because Zeb’s not here! When’s he coming back?”

Hera decides to throw Kanan a lifeline. “Ezra,” she calls. “I need you to keep an eye on the sensor readouts, okay? And Kanan, I could use your help with these diagnostics.”

“Coming!” Kanan yells back. A few moments later she hears his footfalls down the passageway. He rounds the corner: “How’s it looking?”

Hera looks away from the access panel she’s got open to throw him an apologetic glance. She thought she was saving him, but now that he’s here… “It would help if I knew exactly what happened to the ship in that star cluster,” she admits. “I’m not sure what sort of damage to check for.”

“I know you’re used to looking to me for all the answers,” Kanan says drily, and Hera snorts. “But I don’t know.”

“I’m surprised,” Hera says in her sweetest voice.

He eyes her suspiciously. “Yeah, well, it happens sometimes.”

“Oh, I’m not surprised that you don’t know, dear,” she grins. “I’m surprised you’re willing to admit it.”

“Nice,” he chides. “Am I actually here for a reason or just because you need something decorative to look at while that diagnostic runs?”

She makes a show of thinking it over. “Hmm. The engine check has five more minutes. How pretty can you be?”

He strikes a pose, chin lifted and chest puffed out, showing her his craggy profile. One fist rests arrogantly on his hip and the other is splayed just under his chin, as if to frame the view.

“Not bad,” Hera says judiciously.

He postures for her again, this time flexing his left bicep and giving her a ridiculously exaggerated pout, looking up at her through his lashes and pushing out his lips. Hera tries very hard to keep a straight face. “Enh,” she says.

“Not doing it for you?” Kanan smirks. “Hold on. Try this.” He reaches behind his head to shake his hair loose. Then he steps in, close enough that she has tilt her head up to look him in the eyes. He leans a shoulder against the bulkhead, arranging his long limbs with casual grace. Then, in a loose, fluid motion, he draws his blaster, flips it around his hand in a swift and complicated arc, and sheathes it again—all the while looking down at her with a glint in his eyes and a slight, near-hidden smile curving the corners of his mouth.

“Oh, that is _not_ fair,” Hera says, punctuating her words with a finger in the middle of his chest. “The hair thing is cheating.” Then she grabs a fistful of his shirt to drag him down for a kiss. His mouth on hers is hot and hungry, and when she leans into him his hands drop to her hips, pulling her strongly against him. She can feel his…interest.

A disgruntled series of beeps warns them as Chopper trundles down the passageway. Hera immediately drops her hand, and Kanan steps back—he’s gotten shocked before. Chopper has little tolerance for activities that, as he puts it, detract from efficient functioning and impair the organic crewmembers’ already-woefully-insufficient cognitive processes.

“No, Chop,” Hera says in answer to the astromech’s querying whistle. “You can’t turn Zeb’s bunk into a chassis buffing station. He’s coming back.”

Chopper emits a highly dubious grinding noise, turns to Kanan, and queries again. Kanan pinches the bridge of his nose. “What!? I don’t know!”

“All right, sure,” Hera says soothingly. “If Zeb falls into a volcano or is devoured by carnivorous predators down there, you can have his bunk.” Chopper whistles in approval and rolls into the quarters that Ezra and Zeb share.

Kanan puts his hand on her shoulder. “Diagnostic’s finished,” he says.

Hera checks the read-outs. None of the engine subsystems are operating outside expected parameters. No power spikes, no undue lag. Although there are a lot of banging and dragging sounds coming from Zeb’s quarters now.

“I think he’ll be occupied for a while,” Kanan murmurs. His hand is still warm on her shoulder.

Hera closes up the access panel. “I should check the com systems too,” she says. “I can do that from my quarters.” She slides her eyes back to Kanan. “You can help me look for anomalies.”

“Aye-aye, captain,” he says gravely, and falls in behind her when she starts walking.

The hatch closes behind them. Hera punches in the code to seal it. Kanan’s already stripping off his armor.

“Hold on,” she says, moving to her secure holoterminal. “I really do want to get the diagnostic started on the communications array.”

“I won’t get in your way,” Kanan says mildly. A couple steps, and he’s right behind her, his hand resting lightly on the small of her back. “Much.”

Hera crouches down, unscrewing the side panel so that she can create a direct interface to her datapad.  Kanan’s light touch moves to the top of her head, fingers rubbing just strongly enough that she can feel it through her cap. A pleasant surge of warmth goes through her.

Once she’s verified her authorization codes, she can start running the standard tests. Initial readouts all ping green. Kanan has moved his hand just enough that the tips of his fingers are caressing her bare tchin, and now the waves of sensory pleasure are warm _and_ tingly.

“Kanan,” she says. “Look at this.”

He immediately drops his hand, crouching to look over her shoulder—and that’s when she pounces. She drops the datapad, twists around and pushes him backward, confident that he’ll roll with the fall. Confident that he’ll take her with him.

“Whoa!” he laughs as they go tumbling. He tightens his arms around her just as she knew he would, keeping her tucked in close. His back hits the floor and he twists to keep their momentum going. He gives it enough force to roll her over and come up on top, his hips pinning hers to the ground. She’s laughing too as she lifts her head to kiss him.

“These _are_ …anomalous…results,” Kanan pants between kisses. His hand goes to her chin, unsnapping her cap.

“Mmm,” she says, tugging at his shirts. “I need a better look at the data.”

There’s a little tug-of-war between them, each racing to strip the other. Kanan gains the upper hand early, but becomes distracted when her flight suit falls loose. While he’s nuzzling at her breast she’s able to unstrap his belt holster and open his pants.

“No substitute for hard data,” he says, breath hot against her skin, as Hera takes his cock in her hand.

“I am going to pump this _data_ until it’s throbbing,” she tells him—making every word precise— “and then I'm going to straddle it and ride it until it makes me come.”

She can feel the pulse of blood that surges through him in response, and hear the roughness in his voice as he answers: “I see we’ve abandoned the art of innuendo.”

“I speak my mind,” she says archly.

He pulls back, and she lets him, though her fingers drag down the length of his cock as he goes. He moves down her body, peeling away the rest of her clothing. Then he lies down beside her to kiss her again. Her hands wander over his hard chest, raking through the hair that grows there, and following it down his navel.

His hand is nudging between her thighs. She parts her legs for him, letting him push one finger into her. She’s still kissing him, hungry and fierce, as her hand finds his cock again.

He’s added a second finger when the datapad beeps: its array of tests have completed. Hera catches his lower lip between her teeth and gives him one last nipping kiss before she lets go of him: “Hold that thought,” she murmurs.

He draws his hand away with a low sigh, rolling on to his back. Hera sits up and crawls the few steps to the datapad—all com signals are transmitting normally. “Looks good,” she says.

“I’ll say,” Kanan drawls. When she glances back at him she sees his heavy-lidded eyes intent on her, his gaze raking over her naked body while he runs a leisurely hand over his own cock.

So she crawls back, this time watching him as he watches her. He seems fascinated by the sway of her breasts with each movement. When she reaches him, she puts her knees on either side of his hips and her hands on his chest, curling her fingernails into his skin just hard enough to make an impression.

He strokes his palms over her thighs. His eyes are glints of color behind narrowed lids, and the force of his full attention is like an electric field dancing over her skin. She lowers herself onto his cock and feels the first inch of him stretching and filling her.

“Kanan,” she gasps. “I want you.”

“Yes.” His hands tighten on either side of her, and then he rolls his hips fractionally, easing into her and withdrawing again. Her eyes flutter closed as he repeats the motion. Each time his cock slides into her she’s washed with sensation; each time he sinks a little deeper.

She moves a hand down to the place where their bodies meet, twisting her fingers against herself, finding the most sensitive spots. She bites her lip to keep from crying out. And then he’s driving his full length into her, hard upward thrusts as he guides her hips with his hands.

At some point she takes over the rhythm. It’s a wordless negotiation—a push against his chest, a bounce of her thighs. He settles back and she rides him just as she promised, bouncing on his cock with her eyes screwed tight and fingers rubbing at herself. She hears his low groan of release, feels him bucking under her—but she’s not quite there so she keeps up her own beat, over and around him and steadied by his guiding presence. Pleasure blossoms at her core, then rises and rises until it sweeps her away.

She comes back to herself curled against his chest, panting and slick with sweat. He’s holding her tightly. When she lifts her head he just smiles at her, the stern lines of his face made soft and gentle as he looks at her.

“Well, looks like all systems check out,” Hera says, after she’s taken the time to kiss him tenderly. “Any other tests I should run?”

Flat on his back—hair disheveled around him, stripped to the waist and his pants pulled down off his hips—Kanan just shakes his head. “Everyone keeps asking me questions,” he says ruefully. “I got nothing.”

“You’ve got everything,” Hera corrects him, and kisses him again—this time just a soft press of her lips against his cheek.

“Yeah,” he says as his arms tighten around her again. “I guess I do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For HIGHLY NSFW visual inspiration as you read this chapter, check out this [gorgeous (AND NSFW) fanart](http://applesmut.tumblr.com/tagged/kanan-jarrus) by applesmut.


	13. The Call

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All my stories owe a lot to my conversations with CC (gondalsqueen), but this one even more so.

Hera sits in the cockpit long after the jump to hyperspace has been made, letting the recirculating warmth ease into her bones. Because they have an excess of fuel now—and because they’ve earned it—she turns the temperature controls up several degrees higher than usual. It takes a little while for the chill to drop from the air, but eventually a languid, toasty warmth creeps over her.

Kanan comes back after the others have turned in, dropping into the co-pilot’s seat. He’s stripped down to his tight black undershirt. “Finally getting warm again,” he comments.

Hera makes a noncommittal noise. He glances over and tries again: “I thought you’d let Chopper take over once we jumped.”

She shrugs.

“What’s up?” he asks her then. “Purrgil got your tongue?”

“It’s not the purrgils,” she says. He waits. “All right, it’s the purrgils. But not in the way you think.” Hera leans her head back in the seat, closing her eyes. After another moment she said: “You know, when I was a little girl listening to those stories, I thought they were _magical_. Purrgils were just another part of the wide, untamed galaxy that I wanted to see for myself. They stood for possibility, and freedom—even beauty.” She opens her eyes. “And then I grew up and learned that the galaxy is harder and sadder than that, and there is no magic.”

“Come on, after all you’ve seen?” Kanan protests. “There are still wonders out here, you know it.”

“That’s just it!” Hera says, turning toward him for the first time. “I was wrong. The purrgils _are_ magical. I just couldn’t see it.” She shakes her head. “I wonder when I stopped being able to see.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Kanan says. “The galaxy surprised you. That’s a good thing. If you’re never surprised, you’re not paying enough attention.”

“Is that an old Jedi saying?” Hera asks dubiously.

“No, I just made it up. Why, did it sound good?” He’s grinning at her. “Should I write it down?”

She spins back to the viewport, watching the hyperspace lights. “ _You_ surprised me seven years ago,” she says. “At least I was paying attention then.”

He quirks an eyebrow. “What, and I’ve been entirely predictable ever since?”

“Mm, not entirely,” she says, then tilts her head toward him. “Just mostly.”

“Oh, thanks.”

She slides him half a smile. “You know those dumb holos they show? Where some attractive young person from a poor family falls in love with the brooding tycoon of an interstellar corporation?”

“Or ends up taking shelter in a cabin owned by a laconic, suntanned ronto herder with a quick blaster hand,” Kanan says. “Yeah, I like those. You always know what you’re getting into.”

“We had stories like that on Ryloth too.” She waves a hand. “Not big-budget holos, but stories that got passed around. Only the heroes were never tycoons or ronto herders. Know what they were?”

“No,” he says quietly.

“Jedi Knights.”

Kanan looks away. “You made the Jedi the stars of your romances? You, uh, mostly would have been disappointed.” He’s uncomfortable now—not as bad as it would have been if she told him this a few years ago, but it’s still a little awkward. Hera reaches for his hand.

“I thought those stories were silly,” she says. “I knew better than to believe some tall, dark, handsome hero with a laser sword would come along and fall in love with me and fight my battles for me. _That_ doesn’t happen.”

His eyes turn back to hers, his expression soft. Hera squeezes his hand. “And I knew so much about what doesn’t happen,” she says, a little wistfully, “that it took me a long time to realize what already had.”

He’s still watching her with gentle eyes. But his mouth quirks. “Wait,” he says, “Are you calling me handsome?”

Hera rolls her eyes. “That wasn’t the moral of the story.”

“It’s the one I’m taking away.” Then his voice grows more serious. “And anyway, of the two of us, you’ve always been the hero.”

She meets his gaze again. “Kanan,” she says, low and intent. “Surprise me.”

In response he tugs at the fingers of her glove, loosening each in turn until he can draw it off. He raises her hand to his face and wordlessly brushes his lips across her fingers.

Then he releases her and closes his eyes, his face going focused and still. He makes a gesture, and Hera gasps as the chair abruptly falls away beneath her. No—she’s the one who’s rising, floating gently toward the overhead of the cockpit. Kanan stands and draws his hand back. Slowly, she floats closer to him. The Force that surrounds her is invisible, and she can’t sense it like a Jedi would. But she feels something—a kind of attention, like the forces of electromagnetism themselves are taking direction from a stronger will.

And this casual display of power _is_ surprising, coming from Kanan. For years he would use his Jedi abilities only at the utmost need. But ever since Ezra came on board it’s seemed to come more and more naturally to him.

Kanan reaches out beneath her and then she drops, suddenly, her full weight landing in his arms. She twists her arms around his neck as he opens his eyes. “My bunk or yours?” he asks, a little smugly.

“You are not _carrying_ me through the ship,” Hera tells him firmly. “If the kids see us I’ll have to feign a sprained ankle for a week.”

“Fine, the nose turret it is.”

And before she can protest he’s turned between the two pilots’ consoles to jump lightly to the lower station, Hera still in his arms. She tightens her grip on him as they fall, but just before they hit the deck their momentum eases, and Kanan lands in a deep crouch.

“Show off,” she teases.

“You asked me to show off!” he objects.

“Oh, I wasn’t complaining.” She twists in his arms so that she can kiss him, and she keeps teasing at his lips and the rough scratch of stubble by his jawline as he sinks into the gunner’s chair, with her in his lap.

“Neither am I,” he murmurs, and his careful, insistent fingers begin the work of loosening her flight suit.

The viewports all around them reflect the ever-shifting hyperlane display. During these passages Hera always feels that time has been suspended: that her ship exists in its own pocket universe, secret and safe. She watches the blue lights flicker over Kanan’s skin, and reflect in his aquamarine eyes. This man is hers, and nothing is impossible.

She shimmies in his lap to help him pull off her clothing. Then she does it again just because she liked the way it made him react. He leans back in the chair, eyes half-lidded, and runs his hands up and down her body.

She doesn’t feel the need to undress him much. He’s not like a Twi’lek—he’s really just got one major erogenous zone, and it feels like she’s doing a fine job of stimulating it just by moving her weight around in his lap. She does pull his hair loose, both because she can and because he’s unutterably attractive like this, with his hair falling around his shoulders and his black undershirt stretched tight over all the muscles of his chest and arms. _Kanan Jarrus_. Her knight.

She kisses his mouth and his throat and she lets him watch her writhe under his touch. He knows her well, too, after all this time. He shifts his attentions from her lekku, to her breasts, to her cunt, using his hands and mouth and…stars, there’s that feeling of invisible power again, all around her. “Are you…” she pants. His attentions are distracting enough that it’s already hard to form words. “Are you doing something…Force-y?”

His hands still. “I don’t know,” he says at last, and his voice is slow and thick, as if he’d been asleep. “When I connect with you—sometimes it connects me to everything else too.”

He’s told her this before. She even got a glimpse of it, once, and it was wonderful. Still, she double-checks: “That’s good, right?”

“Very good.” He gives a soft breath of laughter. “Alarming at first. But very good.”

So she kisses him, and when he begins caressing her again, she lets the pleasure overwhelm her and lets everything else fall away. It flows through her like a current that grows stronger and stronger until she can’t possibly contain it, and then it explodes in a storm through her body and mind. She spasms, back arching and body shaking, and cries out helplessly against his palm.

At last she collapses back into his encircling arms. He strokes her back, slow and steady, as she catches her breath. When she’s returned to herself she turns around to straddle him, and pulls at his belt.

He guides her, hands on either side of her hips, as she settles over his cock. The gunner’s station really wasn’t designed for this: he has to put himself on the very edge of the chair to give room for her knees. Hera grasps the back of the chair for leverage and begins to rock, back and forth. She doesn’t think it’ll take much.

And she knows she’s right when he buries his face in the curve between her shoulder and neck, gasping her name like a benediction. She moves one of her hands to the back of his head, grasping a fistful of his hair, and grinds more firmly into him. Once, twice—

His hips buck. “Hera,” he gasps again, and then his whole body goes taut. She presses little kisses against his hairline as he spends himself inside her.

For a moment she just cradles him.

Then he sighs, leaning back: “Hera,” he says, “I could hear the song of the purrgil. I was just floating with them between the stars—they’re very intelligent really, good conversationalists—” And at that whatever expression he sees on her face cracks his composure, and a poodoo-eating grin spreads across his face.

Hera smacks his shoulder, pretty hard. “Keep this up and you’ll be _sleeping_ with the purrgil,” she promises. She slides out of his lap and starts collecting her clothing. But Kanan catches her hand, and when she looks back at him—even though he’s still smirking—he tugs her closer.

“Hey,” he says. “Just kidding. You know how it is.” He kisses her fingers again. “Can’t let things get too predictable.”


	14. Homecoming

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rating for this chapter is Mature: there's sex, but it's not explicit.

_Don’t punch Cham Syndulla_ , Kanan tells himself sternly. **_Don’t_** _punch Cham Syndulla_. _At least not until Hera tells you to._

Cham is pointing a blaster at Hera, which is…not something Kanan would ordinarily tolerate. But Kanan’s got very tight control over his own emotions right now: he had to find that calm and distant place inside as soon as he woke to the realization that their erstwhile allies had betrayed and shot his people. Now he’s letting the Force guide him, and he’s focused entirely on the needs of each present moment. None of the Spectres have been seriously harmed, so there’s no _need_ for violence: with restraint and care, they can still salvage this situation.

Calm, focused, and fully in the present, Kanan keeps his attention on the weapon. As long as he’s alert, he’ll feel any energy surge and he’ll be able to use the Force to pull the blaster from Cham before it discharges. Even as Hera walks forward, he simply holds back and maintains his concentration. She’s trying to reason with her father: “Destroy this ship,” she says passionately, “and the Empire will just send another. But if we take it we can use it to fight them!”

Then the Liberator of Ryloth grabs his daughter roughly by the arm, and Kanan thinks: _Blast it, I’m going to punch Cham Syndulla._

“You haven’t been here to see what the Empire has done to our world!” Cham hisses. “They plunder our wealth, and sell our people into slavery! This ship must burn, for all Ryloth to see.”

Cham is pushing Hera forward. Neither of them even glance at Kanan as they pass. Is the man _that_ arrogant, that convinced of his own moral superiority, that he thinks he’ll be allowed to lay hands on Hera with Kanan _standing_ _right here_? If Hera would only meet his eyes, he’d take that as permission.

But she doesn’t. She shakes off her father’s grasp and starts talking about inspiration, community, and the principles of the larger rebellion. Kanan understands pretty quickly that she’s speaking to the other Twi’leks as much as to her father: if Cham won’t join them, perhaps the others can still be allies.

Kanan’s immediate desire to break Cham’s nose fades under the strength of his enduring admiration for Hera. She _is_ a great leader; surely even her father can see that. And her appeal works: Gobi and Numa both voice their support.

“I guess you have your chance,” Cham says finally, “to prove me wrong.”

And then the needs of the moment shift. Kanan and Ezra race to the gun turrets, trusting Hera to coordinate their defense from the bridge. Kanan continues to trust in Hera—even when the stabilizer goes out and he’s thrown against the curving transparisteel bubble that’s the only thing separating himself from the vacuum of space. Even when there’s an Imperial light cruiser closing in on their position.

And even though he’s left Hera alone with a man who had a blaster trained on her two minutes earlier. What she needs most in the moment is a reliable gunner, so the gun turret is where he stays.

Once she makes the jump to hyperspace, Kanan closes his eyes and lets his link to the living Force dwindle and drain, fading into its usual place in the background of his awareness. He’s immediately exhausted. Compared to the mental clarity of the past hour, his thoughts seem muddled and dull, and he’s suddenly aware of every bruise and ache.

One thing he _must_ do, before he rejoins Hera and Cham, is to release any residual anger or fear. Those emotions that he pushed away during the mission: they’re still with him. He feels them in his body. He breathes in, breathes out, and takes a few seconds to deal with each in turn.

Yes, he’s angry at Cham. Angry, disappointed, and bitter at the betrayal. He’d wanted so badly to form a bond; despite Hera’s estrangement from her father, he knew her people back on Ryloth remained important to her. And he’d believed that Cham must be an exceptional man, to raise such a daughter. Kanan had hoped they could be friends—maybe even family.

In a secret part of him, Kanan had been relieved to have an _actual_ father around. Kanan knows that he fills that role now for Sabine and Ezra, but everything he knows about parenting comes from holos. He would’ve liked to have a role model.

And in truth, Cham _is_ exceptional. He has all the bravery, cunning, and charisma that Kanan would have expected in such a celebrated war hero. He’s also ruthless, overbearing, and convinced of his own moral certitude to a degree that borders on narcissism. It’s as if all the traits Kanan admires in Hera had been pushed to a warped extreme.

Cham has clearly been deeply wounded by all that he and his people have suffered. And if he did nothing else as a father, at least he was able to provide enough of a shield that Hera didn’t have to harden herself in the same way, or to such a degree.

There. That’s the thought that Kanan needs, in order to bring himself back to a place of compassion.

No one was badly hurt. It wasn’t like the great betrayal of his past; it was only a distant echo. Cham and his people shot to stun, and they made the right choice in the end. They remain important allies.

Kanan doesn’t have to _forgive_. He’ll never trust Cham again, and he’ll never look to him for any kind of guidance. But he’ll be able to deal with Cham without bitterness.

He breathes deep and opens his eyes. All right. He’s ready to focus on the others, instead of himself.

They regroup in the hangar bay, where Kanan can see that everyone else is equally worn out. Cham and Hera speak to each other with careful, formal courtesy: the rest of them trade apologetic looks every now and then. There’s a long couple hours as the crew for the new ship is assigned and shuttled over. Sabine and Numa manage to strike up an actual conversation about the merits of thermal versus electrical detonators.

The cell from Ryloth is offered—and politely declines—bunks for a shift on the fleet. They’re eager to start the journey back home. The Spectres assemble as an informal send-off committee, and despite their glazed expressions nobody is actually swaying on their feet.

“I’m getting reports from all over Ryloth,” Cham says, by way of goodbye. “Our people are rallying against the Empire. Every hour more join our ranks.”

“Glad to hear it, sir,” Kanan answers respectfully. And he is.

Then the other Spectres turn away, to give Hera and her father some privacy. Kanan is the last to go. He sees Hera offer Cham an embrace, and watches her gaze follow his shuttle as it flies away.

He can’t read her feelings—can’t tell to what degree she and her father have truly reconciled, or whether she’s simply acting as a rebel leader must, solidifying alliances and maintaining assets. She looks perfectly composed, even quietly pleased. That doesn’t necessarily mean she’s come out of all this unscathed.

He walks back to her, stopping close enough that she could touch him if she wanted to. She doesn’t. “Back to the _Ghost_?” he suggests. “It’s been a long day.”

“Yeah,” she says. “If we can grab one of these shuttles.”

It turns out that Phoenix Leader has no trouble commandeering a shuttle, although Ezra and Zeb start a war over legroom on the way back that threatens to go system-wide when a stray kick grazes Sabine. She starts punching an ominous-sounding code into her gauntlet, Chopper brandishes his electro-prod, Kanan futilely attempts to make peace, and finally from the cockpit Hera snaps: _“I will turn this shuttle around.”_ They fly in silence for the rest of the trip.

Once the shuttle lands in the _Liberator_ Kanan takes the other Spectres back over to the _Ghost_ , while Hera stays behind for a debriefing with Sato. It’s Zeb’s turn to cook, fortunately: tempers improve as the spicy aromas begin to waft through the common area. Kanan pulls out a case of jogan-flavored fizzy drinks from storage (Old Jho fobbed the drinks off on them before they left Lothal—the crates are a cycle past their expiration dates and going flat) and makes everyone drink two. Getting stunned is definitely better than getting blasted, but it’s still hard on the body. The fluids and the sugars will help.

After their meal the crew disperses. Kanan sets a bowl of stew aside for Hera and starts a pot of caf. Chopper, trundling through, offers an unsolicited and unflattering analysis of the declining air quality in the common room in the wake of four organic crewmembers and their digestive processes.

“Uh huh,” Kanan says. Then a thought strikes him. “Hey, Chop. You’ve seen Hera dealing with her father before.”

 _ChamSyndulla == flawed logic circuits_ , Chopper whistles disapprovingly. _CaptainHeraSyndulla == superior sensor arrays and long-term reasoning capacity._

“Yeah, agreed,” Kanan says. “But what I meant is—do you think she’s doing okay?”

 _CaptainHeraSyndulla == no damage sustained_ , Chopper beeps. There’s a questioning note to his response, though. _C1-10P == removed binders without injury._

“Binders?!” Kanan had assumed she got stunned like the rest of them—maybe on a lighter setting, so that she woke up first. But to put her in binders—that would mean she was physically overpowered, or threatened into submission. Kanan’s remembering a few of the scenarios that've ended with Hera in binders, and his hard-won calm is slipping fast. “Karabast—did Cham think he was _sparing_ her?”

 _Interrogative == useless_ , Chopper grinds out. _Time required to parse logic behind organic actions == infinite._

No. To leave her in binders—awake, but helpless and humiliated—that had to be meant as a lesson. An experience meant to teach Hera the futility of defying Cham’s authority.

And it was also stupid. Of course she got out, and was able then to rouse the others. Cham’s whole plan might have _worked_ if he hadn’t underestimated his daughter.

“I wish I’d punched Cham Syndulla,” Kanan mutters.

“Well, then he’d _never_ invite you home for Life Day.” Kanan spins to see Hera, looking tired and drawn, in the hatch of the common area. “And anyway, none of them would have listened to reason after that,” she adds wearily.

Chopper mutters a dark comment regarding what organics mistake for _reason_ and wheels himself out, bumping rather deliberately into Hera on the way. She pats his chassis absently.

“Hey,” Kanan says. “Didn’t hear you come in. I saved you some grub, though.”

She slides into the dejarik booth, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. “Smells good,” she says.

Kanan brings her the bowl, and the caf. And a jogan fizz for good measure. Maybe her circulatory system doesn’t need the sugar, but her spirits might. He slides in across from her as she eats. “Is Sato happy with the carrier?”

“Ecstatic,” Hera says around a mouthful of stew.

“Wait, did he actually smile?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. More a…relaxing, around the lips.” She takes another bite and asks: “How’s Ezra? He did very well today.”

“I told him that,” Kanan says. “He’s supposed to be meditating, but he’s probably listening to music with Zeb and Sabine.”

“They did well too.”

“They did,” Kanan agrees. And then, because the opening is there, he prods a little: “Our Ryloth allies, I give them a ‘Low Satisfactory.’ Maybe a ‘Needs Improvement.’”

“For what it’s worth,” she says, after taking a deep drink of her jogan fizz, “my father did like you. When he listed all the reasons he was disappointed in me, you didn’t figure at all.”

“I don’t care.” That comes out a little more harshly than he meant it to.

She looks over the table at him, her face skeptical. “I don’t,” Kanan says. “I can work with him, I can be polite, but I don’t give a rotten meiloorun for his opinion. I meant it when I said I don’t like your father anymore.” _And that was before I knew about the blasted binders_.

“Sometimes I don’t like him either,” she says sadly, and goes back to her stew. “But he’s still my father.”

Kanan opens his mouth to say _I understand_ , but the truth is that he doesn’t. So he falls silent as Hera finishes her meal. “Anything we need to talk out?” he asks at last.

She sighs. “Not for me. I’m tired. You?”

“No,” he says, carefully keeping his voice very normal. “But I’d really like to get a look at your wrists under those gloves. See if we need to pull out the medkit.”

Her eyes flick up to his, and she holds the gaze steady for a long moment. Then she pulls off her gloves, one at time, and stretches out her hands across the table. He takes her wrists gently in his hands, turns them over and then back. There’s some light bruising, nothing too severe. “Do you want these wrapped?” he asks.

“I think it’s fine.”

“Up to you,” he says. “But a pilot’s hands are important.”

She sighs again. “All right.”

When he comes back with the medkit she’s in the galley, cleaning the dishes. He waits until she’s done, and then she stands still and holds out first one arm for him, then the other. He wraps them from her hands, leaving the fingers free, to mid-forearm. There’s something soothing about the careful, repetitive work of going around and around her arm, maintaining enough tension to provide some slight compression and not enough to be uncomfortable. It’s a relief to be able to _do_ something, and he’s grateful to her for allowing it. “There,” he says, and lets her go. “Anything else I can do?”

She picks up her gloves, but doesn’t put them on. When she looks up at him there’s a sudden fire in her eyes.

“ _This_ is my home,” she says. “ _You_ are my family.”

“That’s true for all of us,” Kanan says gently.

She takes a half-step forward, sliding her arms around him and resting her head against his chest. He holds her tightly. After a moment she says: “This is nice. I could do more of this.” Then she yawns. “But I also need to sleep.”

“We could do both,” he offers. “Sleep together, and I mean _just_ sleep.”

“I’ll meet you in your quarters.”

He’ll hold her that night, finding peace in the rhythm of her heartbeat and the stir of her breath on his skin. When the old, bad dreams rise up she’ll shake him out of them, rousing him just enough to slip back into untroubled sleep. In the morning he’ll wake first and watch her tranquil face as she sleeps.

For Kanan, the place he’s from is a vanished memory. Parts of what was the Jedi temple may still stand, but everything that made it a sanctuary has been destroyed. He is not even the same person that once called that place home.

For Hera, her birthplace is a locus of both pain and hope. Throughout her childhood, home was an ideal, an aspiration. They made camps in the battlefields. They drew lines to defend, and then drew new ones when those were lost. They said they fought to defend their homes, but she is not sure that they ever had any.

Now, for them both, home is not somewhere to go but instead something to make. They create it together wherever they travel. They try to teach the others how it’s done: Ezra, child of Lothal. Zeb with his lost and his rediscovered worlds. Sabine who carries herself like an exile. Even Chopper, who perhaps of all of them knew it first: an origin is not the same thing as a home.  

When Hera opens her eyes he’ll kiss her, and then they’ll make slow and languid love together, reminding themselves of all the ways their bodies can find solace in each other. Remapping well-known territory; taking note of new bruises, and old scars. Remembering how to come home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now with art by Pornflakes!
> 
>  


	15. The Honorable Ones

“Geonosis?” Hera echoes. “Are you sure?”

On the other end of the secure holochannel, Numa’s face wavers—but her eyes are forthright. “Your father specifically asked me to pass on this information,” she says. “To you. And to apologize, that he could not make the time to contact you personally.”

“He didn’t say that,” Hera says, eyes narrowing. “He didn’t say, ‘apologize.’”

To her credit, Numa doesn’t drop her gaze. “He said to send his regrets.”

“Tell him,” Hera says. “Tell him that the Rebellion appreciates—and _I_ appreciate—the intelligence.”

“I will,” says Numa. “ _Ka’ta_.”

And that’s when Hera realizes that they’ve been having this whole conversation in Basic: why? Did her father ask _that_ of Numa, too?

And why did it take her so long to notice?

“ _Ka’ta_ ,” she says, and cuts the transmission.

Materials and human resources diverted on a _massive_ scale to Geonosis.  She can’t deny that’s interesting. The timeline’s a little wonky though, and she wishes she had a better understanding of how this information wound up on Ryloth.

Still, it matters that her father is reaching out. It will matter far more if he’s sent her something she can use.

She’s striding out of her quarters, datapad in hand—already calling up hyperspace routes to Geonosis—when she almost collides with Kanan just outside the hatch. He catches her by the elbows, steadying her. She blinks up at him in mild annoyance. “What are you doing?”

“I…” He stutters, uncharacteristically flustered. “Look, I don’t normally…I was walking by, that’s all. And I couldn’t help but hearing.”

Hera blinks up at him in honest confusion. “Hearing…about Geonosis?” She doesn’t know why he’d eavesdrop on that, but she was about to fill him in on the whole situation anyway.

He shakes his head impatiently. “No, I wasn’t listening to the words. Just that your voice was so different.”

She stares at him, still confused, until he says: “Your accent.”

“Oh!” Had she slipped back into a Ryloth accent, talking to Numa? It’s possible. “Did I sound like this?” she asks, letting the _i_ s elongate and the _th_ sound buzz slightly between her teeth.

Kanan’s reaction is immediate and startling. He flushes, the bronze of his cheeks taking on a darker and ruddier hue. His mouth is slightly open and his eyes fixed on her face. Hera tilts her head, expression settling into an amused smirk. “ _Ghost_ to Kanan,” she says in the clipped, flattened tones she learned to adopt after leaving Ryloth. “Come in, Kanan.”

He swallows. “I—that’s just—I mean, it…it’s interesting, it’s…something I didn’t know about you. Although I guess I would have if I ever thought about it, which…I didn’t. Obviously.”

Hera arches a skeptical eyebrow. “I haven’t seen you this flustered since the first time I met you on Gorse. I remember wondering if you spoke Basic at all, you were so tongue-tied.”

Kanan runs a hand over his hair. “Come on, I wasn’t that bad.”

“You were absurd.” Hera eyes him impishly, and lets her tongue relax back into her native accent. It still comes naturally to her; it still feels like a more graceful and expressive way of talking. “Just imagine,” she says, “if I’d introduced myself like this. It would have taken you a week to remember your own name.”

Kanan takes a quick, rasping breath and closes his eyes, obviously trying to tamp down on his own reaction. “Absurd!” Hera says gleefully, and this time lets it roll off her tongue as _ahbzurd_. Oh, this is fun. She didn’t know what to make of Kanan the first time they met; he was obviously capable in a fight, but when she tried to talk to him he was all boggle-eyed stares and ridiculous, sweeping offers designed to convince her of the merits of his company. (“ _Anyone will tell you. I can do anything._ _You need something done, I'm there_. _You can have anything you want.”_ Well, maybe not so ridiculous in retrospect.)

But by the time she learned to trust him enough that she could actually enjoy provoking that kind of a reaction, he’d developed much more self-restraint. Now she rarely gets to see his composure slip. And yet suddenly it’s as if she had the Kanan of that first night in front of her again, all stunned admiration and raw desire.

Hera glances back and forth, ensuring that the passageway is clear. And then she drops her voice lower. “Or—” she says, still in the richer, more musical Ryloth intonations, “imagine this. You know how you always like me to tell you how it feels when you’re fucking me?” _Fucking_ is a more seductive word in a Ryloth accent: the vowel deepens and the harsh consonants soften. It also makes Kanan’s eyes snap open.

His hands move from her elbows to her shoulders. “Like I’m about to?” he asks roughly.

Hera just smiles. In her normal voice, she says: “Then maybe I’m about to tell you.”

He steps forward, his grip on her shoulders guiding her backwards as he closes in. Hera lets herself be led back into her quarters, and Kanan turns to seal the hatch behind them.

“When we first met you offered me a bed at that horrible cantina you were living in,” Hera reminisces. “The Asteroid Belt.”

“With me in it or not, as I recall. You declined either way.” He turns back to her, gathering her into his arms. Hera slides a hand behind his neck.

“What would you have done,” she murmurs as she tugs him down for a kiss, “if I’d accepted?”

But his eyes grow shadowed. “Disappointed you, probably,” he says. Then he lowers his head, and the instant before their lips meet he breathes: “I’ll try not to do that now.”

He kisses her gently at first, then with greater urgency, until her entire body has roused to his presence: she’s clinging to him, rising on her toes so that she can return his kiss with equal fervor. Her lekku are trembling. Finally he pulls back, his eyes intent. His thumb traces the line of her jaw before he moves it to pull open the chinstrap of her cap.

“Kanan,” she sighs. Then, as he pulls her cap away, she says his name again—this time with the Ryloth cadence. The difference is subtle, but the two syllables of his name take on equal weight, and there’s an ever-so-slight change to the vowel sounds. “ _Kanan_.”

He makes a low, raw sound of acknowledgement and kisses her again, this time on her throat. She twists her fingers in the tail of his hair and begins pulling at the straps of his armor. Into his ear, in accented Basic, she whispers: “I want to feel your skin on mine.”

He raises his head to nuzzle at her earcones. His fingers are on her collar, loosening the buttons there. His deep, soft voice thrills over her as he says: “You will. I’m going to strip you naked.” His hand moves down to her chestpiece, tugging at the fastenings. “And then I’m going to touch every part of you. And taste you.”

In response she nips at his mouth, catching his lower lip between her teeth.  She’s got his armor free now: she lets it drop lightly to the deck. He breaks off their kiss just long enough to say: “And hear you.”

“Until I can’t talk,” she promises, the Ryloth accent still thick on her tongue.

“Even after,” he says hoarsely. And after a beat: “When you can’t talk is when you’re the loudest.”

A few years ago that might have really offended her. Now she just smacks his shoulder, not hard. She knows he isn’t joking at her expense. He’s thanking her, for a secret shared.

Piece by piece, their clothing falls away. Hera tugs Kanan’s shirts over his head; he lets her flight suit fall around her ankles. She steps out of her clothing and takes his hands, drawing him back to the bunk. She settles onto it as he kicks off his boots and sheds his pants.

“I’m not ashamed of my homeworld,” Hera says abruptly. It feels important that he understand this. “That’s not why I worked to lose my accent.”

He stretches out beside her, running a palm over the curve of her hip. “I didn’t think that,” he says gently.

“It’s just—people think of a Ryloth accent as provincial. It made me seem inexperienced.” She’s using standard Basic now, the patterns of speech that have become customary over the years. “It made me more of a target.”

Kanan leans in to kiss her shoulder. “I had to do the same thing,” he says. “A Coruscanti accent in the Outer Rim means someone sheltered and rich. Easy pickings.”

Of course he was raised on Coruscant—she knew that. But there’s no trace of it in his voice. “It’s hard to imagine you with a Core Worlds accent,” she admits.

“Uh—hold on. I have to think of something I used to say a lot.” He closes his eyes. Then, in crisply enunciated tones, he says: “Emotion, yet peace. Ignorance, yet knowledge.”

When he opens his eyes again, whatever expression he sees on Hera’s face makes his face soften. “Ah,” he laughs. “It works on you too.” He leans close and says in the same measured, cultured voice: “Passion, yet serenity.”

But it’s not the accent that’s poleaxed her. It’s the glimpse she’s just seen of Kanan as one of the Jedi of old. Not just her secret knight in a battered drifter’s coat, but a figure that would have commanded respect wherever he went. As he speaks in those rich tones, she can picture him in cowled robes and a cloak that would swirl behind him.

And though she knows in the same instant that she can never ask this of him, not even in the privacy of a shared bed—it’s not a costume to be worn for thrills, and these memories cause him pain—she’s electrified by the image. She reaches for him, scratching her fingers down his chest. “Go on,” she whispers.

He shifts, moving his body over hers. “Chaos, yet harmony.” He leans in to press his mouth to hers, just a small, soft kiss. “Death, yet the Force.”

She smooths her hand over his head. For once, she doesn’t feel the urge to pull his hair loose. It suits the image she’s still holding in her head—Master Jarrus would wear his hair tied back.

His hands are wandering over her body even as his mouth moves to her lek, kissing her all down its length. She’s panting by the time he reaches the tip. “Kanan,” she gasps.

“Talk to me,” he prompts, lapsing back into his Outer Rim drawl. “Tell me what I’m doing to you.”

“You’re—stars, you’re licking my tchin.” Hera’s trying to use the Ryloth pronunciations, but she’s growing increasingly distracted. There’s no telling where her accent is going to land from word to word. “And—and your hands are on my breasts, you’re...” _Teasing and tugging and pinching and making them ache for more._ “…touching me.” She sighs, arching her back into his attentions. “Oh! Ohh, now you’re…kissing me there.”

His mouth is hot on her breasts: he moves from to the other and back, sucking and licking. “It’s...” Hera pants. “It’s sharp and it’s sweet and it feels like—like you could make me feel anything.” Her hands clutch at his shoulders. “I love you.”

He lifts his head, the clear blue-green of his eyes steady and intent. “And I love you,” he says, in the perfect and even tones of the Core Worlds. Of the legendary Jedi Masters. Heat floods through her, and Hera makes an involuntary sound that comes out like a whimper. The corners of his eyes crinkle.

“Now you’re pushing my legs apart,” Hera whispers. “Running your fingers up my thighs and over my…” Saying the word is unexpectedly embarrassing. There are clinical, medical terms, and then there’s flowery euphemisms—many do actually involve flowers. And at least a dozen crude slang terms that double as the kind of insult guaranteed to start a cantina-wide brawl. But as Kanan’s fingers part her inner folds, Hera settles on the simplest and most direct of all those words. “Over my cunt.”

“I told you I would touch you everywhere,” he says. His accent is wavering a little, but it steadies as he says in those calm, posh tones: “I told you that I’ll taste you.” Hera whimpers again.

And then he settles between her legs, and she forgets about speech altogether.

When she comes it’s with his tongue lapping at her and his fingers inside her. She pulls him up, once she’s steady enough, and kisses him deeply. Then she whispers, in her native accent: “You also told me that you’d fuck me.”

He groans as she takes him in hand, and moves himself over her. She talks him through it: even the crudest of words are a little richer, a little more musical in the Ryloth pronunciation. “Your cock is sliding into me,” she breathes, “I want it deeper—Can you feel how I’m pulsing around you? Can you feel how hot and slick you’ve made me? I can take more—ah, yes, _yes_ , I love that, I love your cock driving into me—” until he stiffens, and with a low, hoarse cry spends himself inside her.

After he rolls off her they lie together in silence, Kanan gently running the back of his forefinger up and down her arm. Finally Hera says: “I don’t think you would have disappointed me.”

He pauses, then resumes his soft caress. “Maybe not. I was already in love with you.”

This is an old argument, and she chooses not to engage with it. She keeps telling Kanan that people don’t really fall in love at first sight. _You don’t_ , is his only response. Instead, she sighs: “I should tell you about Geonosis. The intel’s a little sketchy, but it sounds like the Empire has a massive project there.”

“You’re thinking…what, a recon mission?”

“Something like that,” Hera says. “We need to be prepared to get in and out of the system quickly, and possibly to fend off interceptors while we’re readying the jump out.”

“Sounds like we could use another gunner,” Kanan says thoughtfully. “I’ll talk to Rex.”

 _You need something done, I'm there_. No, in retrospect nothing he told her that first night was untrue. There are vague thoughts buzzing around in her head, about assumed names and altered voices. The parts of them that are constructed and the parts that are immutable. The ways of knowing another person and the ways that they remain unknowable.

But all she says is: “Thank you, love.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now with art by Pornflakes!
> 
>  


	16. Shroud of Darkness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the shameful kinktastic chapter where Kanan remembers the very most depraved episodes from his sordid past. Please mind the new tags: Canon-typical violence, Drunk sex, Anal sex, Rimming, Bondage, Flogging, Group Sex, Bukkake, Original Characters. If you want to skip this one and rejoin next chapter, you won't be missing anything plot-wise.

**Now. The Present.**

“Such a handsome face,” the Inqusitor sneers, over the snapping hiss of their lightsabers bound in equal struggle.

“I don’t go for crazy,” Kanan growls. And then, in an instant—just as people say happens to the dying—scenes from his life flash up behind his mind’s eye. They come in serial, three of them. In each one the faces of his lovers have grown distant and blurred, and yet there’s a piece of the memory that’s crystal clear.

**Scene 1**

He remembers the taste.

The pleasant burn of alcohol—and a lot of it—in the back of his throat. The salty taste of sweat on the tip of his tongue. He’d steeled himself for something worse, but it’s really just sweat. The big Togrutan is relaxing, his hard ass yielding to Kanan’s hands and flicking, circling tongue. All two hundred-some pounds of the armored, muscled alien are bent over the bar—Kanan’s got the dude’s asscheeks spread between his palms and he’s eating the guy out with increasing gusto.

There’s a spreading pool of some unidentified poisonous substance just by his right elbow, but Kanan’s ignoring that, the same way he’s ignoring the groans of other bar patrons beginning to come around. None of them are in any shape to interrupt his fun. Kanan’s going to get this big guy all revved up, and then he’s gonna find something to use for lube and he’s gonna fuck Hard-Ass t’Painted Tails right here over the bar. Because he asked. Nicely.

Kanan had seriously been minding his own business. Sure, he saw right away that he was the only human in the cantina. He felt the way unfriendly eyes followed him as he strode to the bar. But he had dianthium strips to pay with—much better than credits, out here—and more importantly, he was thirsty. He flicked his coat out behind him as he settled on a stool.

He’d made his order, and paid for it. Real simple—he wanted six shots of boga noga, all lined up. He wasn’t being a nuisance or trying to make chit-chat: he just wanted a drink. Or, well. Six drinks.

He’d knocked back the first two and lifted the third when a heavy hand fell on his shoulder. Kanan had turned his head, just fractionally, to see an Aqualish standing beside him. Then he’d gone ahead and drained the third shot. “Move your hand,” he’d rasped.

The Aqualish made some noises that a less charitable person than Kanan might compare to nerf bleats.  A ripple of laughter spread through the cantina.

“I didn’t catch all of that,” Kanan said calmly. “Move your hand, or you won’t be moving anything in a second.”

The Togrutan on the next stool over had turned his head, at that. He was barrel-chested, broader than a kath hound in the shoulders, and he was plated with mismatched and carbon-scored armor. His high, curving montrals and thick head tails were painted with intricate patterns. “He says you look like a pretty little cocksucker,” the Togrutan said in a bored tone. “He says to get on your knees.”

“Tell him he can buy me a drink,” Kanan answered, and picked up his fourth shot.

Then the Aqualish yanked on his shoulder, and Kanan had the sudden, fierce, glad rush of knowing he’d closed off all his options. The boga noga was already sloshing all over his gloves. He dropped it in the same moment that he kicked out, shoving a boot off the bar and adding more momentum to his spin than the Aqualish was prepared for. He came around with his fist clenched. It made a sickening wet sound as it thudded into the other man’s mouthsacks.

The Aqualish staggered back. Unfortunately, there wasn’t quite enough room for him to fall gracefully. Instead he thudded into a Rodian—who staggered into an Ugnaut—who kicked the stool out from under the big Togrutan on her way down.

Kanan was already finding his feet, improvising his own barstool into a combination shield and spear. This whole place was gonna go up in a moment. With his left hand, he fumbled for one of the last of his remaining shots, and grimaced as the burning liquid hit the back of his throat. With any luck, the sixth and last shot would still be waiting for him afterwards.

Sometime early in the scrum, the bartender attempted to assert order, firing into the melee with a stun blaster. Kanan ducked, and from two stools over he heard the Togrutan put an end to the threat behind them with the crunch of a wrist and jaw. After that, Kanan just kept his back to the bar and established a perimeter. The reach of his barstool became a dead man’s zone.

When they finally stopped coming, he dropped the stool and looked around. There were a lot of bodies lying motionless on the floor. He was pretty sure none of them were actually dead, and he had zero inclination to examine the source of that certainty. The bar itself was covered in puddles of dubious provenance.

His sixth shot was long gone. “Well, green hells,” Kanan swore.

The only other sentient still on their feet was the big armored Togrutan. He cast an unimpressed look at Kanan down the bar. “You couldn’t’ve just sucked his cock?” the man demanded in a gravelly voice. “Look at all this waste.”

Kanan wiped the back of his fist over his mouth, checking for blood. “He didn’t buy me a drink.”

The Togrutan scoffed, then stomped off. Kanan didn’t think any more of it—he was still patting himself down for unnoticed wounds—until the slide of something heavy across a smooth surface caught his attention. He put his hand up just in time for the half-full, only slightly cracked bottle of boga noga to thud into his gloved palm.

“That’s your poison, right?” the Togrutan rumbled.

“Yeah,” Kanan said. “Look at that.”

“I’ll pay for it. If, y’know. Sammo ever wakes up to ask.”

Kanan gave the painted Togrutan a slow, glittering look through downturned lashes. His blood was pulsing all through his body from the fight. And pulsing now for a different reason.

“We gonna fight or we gonna fuck?” the Togrutan demanded.

Kanan lifted the cracked bottle and knocked back his sixth shot. “I have milliplex, but I’m on the strip,” he’d said. “Tell me what you want.”

Five minutes later, he had alcohol on the back of his throat and the taste of this guy’s sweaty asshole on his tongue. The Togrutan was slowly relaxing beneath him. At the end of the night, Kanan still wouldn’t know his name, but he’d remember the sound the man made when he was entered. He’d remember his easy, friendly smile afterward, too. The clasp of his strong hand.

Everything else, Kanan loses with the dregs of the boga noga.

**Scene 2**

He remembers the pain.

Kanan is on his knees, hands cuffed behind his back, and there’s a hot stinging hurt striped along the skin of his chest and throbbing in his jaw. He’s already been slapped once and he’s looking up at the woman who wants to be called ‘mistress’ with barely concealed challenge.

Nimmiya is beautiful, in a distant and expensive way. She wears a figure-skimming tunic with asymmetrical cut-outs that bare her skin in _interesting_ places, and her face has the kind of cold, unmoving delicacy that he associates with particularly good face-sculpters. She’s also holding the chain that connects to the broad collar around his neck.

She asked him, before she fixed that collar on him. Kanan said yes. He’s kneeling—hurting—looking up at her with a wolfish grin, and waiting for the order that he won’t be inclined to obey.

It was the expense that first caught his eye. Kanan has an appreciation for sentients of all genders, but especially those who seem oriented to care for the most helpless in their societies. He tends to like women, and he likes them most in full threat-display: the naked growl of the mother manka crouched before its den. That kind of beauty can be found in any part of the galaxy.

In truth, any sentient can be beautiful in the right light, or when passion and ferocity transform their faces. Still: beautiful and _expensive_ women are rare in the squalid corners Kanan frequents.

Nimmiya would never risk her hide to protect someone other than herself. That isn't the kind of threat she projects. She stalked into the greasy corners of Kanan’s awareness in her carefully shredded tunics and her tailored stiletto-heeled boots, and he’d whistled: “Who is _that_?”

“Ach,” the miner beside him had spat, leaving a glistening hork of mucus on the counter. “Don’t go with her. Last five roughnecks she picked up outta here, were never seen again.”

“Well,” Kanan had breathed. “Isn’t that interesting.”

Now—having deliberately drawn her attention, and having grown closer to her over the course of two suggestion-filled evenings that ended with Kanan watching her ass twitch as she walked away—he figures there's a seventy, maybe eighty percent chance that she's actually going to try and sell him into slavery. He learned almost nothing about her in those two previous nights, but the kind of questions _she_ asked: they mostly seemed designed to figure out whether anybody would miss him if he disappeared.

They would not.

Then she asked if he’d come home with her, and he said yes.

She asked if she could bind his hands, and when he agreed she’d opened a drawer with an array of restraints, ranging from purely symbolic silken cords to the kind of custom binders only bounty hunters generally employed. For him, she’d selected a midrange set—durasteel, but not electrified. Kanan wouldn’t be able to break these without calling on the Force. (Not an option.)

She told him to kneel. He knelt. She pulled off his clothes and he didn’t resist.

She told him to call her “mistress” and he’d just grinned at her, which is when she slapped him. Hard enough that he tasted blood in the corner of his lips. Then she’d thrust two fingers into his mouth, and _that_ was hot and welcome enough that he instinctively sucked them, swirling his tongue over her knuckles. She’d drawn them out with a slow smile, and asked if she could collar him.

He’d said yes.

He was wondering if she’d pull out a shock collar. That would be real trouble for him, especially with his hands bound: but it also might have tipped her hand prematurely. A real, Imperial-grade shock collar would be hard to pass off as a toy. Instead, she fastened a broad leather band around his neck, and gave a couple experimental jerks to the attached chain just to see him bare his throat.

 _That_ made him fully hard, for the first time all night. Because it was clearly done just for her pleasure, no mercenary motive: whatever else she might be planning, she truly liked seeing him naked and bound and on his knees.

“Can I mark you?” she’d asked then. She’d set his leash aside to pick up a wicked-looking multi-tailed whip, which she ran lightly through her pale, long-fingered hands. Then she watched Kanan lick his lips, and she stroked the whip again.

“Yes,” Kanan had said, and then her arm moved in a quick, controlled burst of rage, and the lashes of the whip left thin, fiery welts across the skin of his chest. He’d gasped, but he hadn’t cried out.

“Thank your mistress,” Nimmiya had prompted, and that’s when Kanan just looked up at her and grinned again. The danger of the moment hovered between them—she might choose to betray him, or not. And in the heart of his most honest self he could not have said which way he was hoping for it to go.

**Scene 3**

He remembers the fear.

It honestly had started so well. A hard job, an unexpected bonus. A half-price fare to Glee Anselm. Kanan was playing the part of a tourist and enjoying it to the hilt. Or…telling himself that he enjoyed it, anyway.

So long as he had the creds to spend, life was easy and comfortable. On the floating turtle-borne resort all his meals were provided, and though Kanan—out of long habit—made any bed he slept in the instant he left it, he always had the feeling that others were creeping into his cabin afterwards to shake out the linens and fold them again, a little tighter and a little neater.

There was something too seductive about it. He hadn’t had anyone caring for him in this way since he’d been a child. And back then, for all his questions, he’d never thought to ask where the food came from, or who tailored his clothes. He had no idea how spotty his education had been until he was dropped without warning into the _real_ world. To fight with rats for garbage.

Now, he looked for those that made the food. He looked to see where the trash went. The invisible hands cleaning the cabin in his absence made him profoundly uneasy. He wanted to be the watcher, not the watched.

He ended up spending most of his time in the pools. The giant turtle that carried the whole resort had been fixed with a complicated harness that included several ancillary bubble-pools. Some were very fancy, fixed with diving scaffolds, or dragging their own heating and whirlpool elements along.

But the one that most of the natives seemed to prefer was the lowest and simplest of these pools: just a net, really, tied to the last claw of the turtle’s starboard flipper. Kanan could see the slow, huge, straining motions of the beast above as it made its mysterious and inexorable way over the planet’s liquid surface. All the motion of the pool was generated by the turtle’s steady, surging forward motion.

The inhabitants—mostly although not exclusively Nautolans of all genders—prefered to go naked in that pool. There was a fair bit of casual petting that, at first, stilled when Kanan would enter. He’d asked if he should leave, but they were dismissive. “Stay if you like, human! Most offworlders can’t appreciate the rhythms of the Mother.”

Kanan felt something, though he was _profoundly_ uninterested in dwelling on the details of the experience. All he knew—all he wanted to know—was that the pool was the calmest place in the entire resort, and the only one where he didn’t feel like a fish on display in a bowl. (Probably not the best way to phrase it, but accurate.)

By the end of the cruise, they were used to his presence. Instead of pulling furtively apart when he dove in, they tended to give him friendly nods and continue caressing each other.

Nautolans are pretty. They have three genders, or maybe four. There’s definitely the egg-layers, the inseminators, and then the child-incubators. Although Kanan wasn’t sure if it was the case that either an egg-layer or an inseminator could be a child-incubator, or that both could be neither. He knew, in any case, that their eggs are hatched outside their bodies and they don’t suckle their young, so none of them have breasts or curving, child-birthing hips.

But they all have those huge, hypnotic, nictitating eyes, and they all have the graceful cluster of head-tentacles that they adorn with rings and ribbons. Their bodies are sleek and tightly packed with subcutaneous fat, to keep them warm in the frigid depths. Nautolans are very pretty.

And their society has gender equality, so as long as Kanan was speaking in Basic it would only be a minor faux pas if he happened to misgender someone. In fact they seem to have a mischievous approach to the galaxy-dominant gender binary. Kit Fisto used to insist on masculine pronouns except on the third seconday of every month, when he… _she_ …celebrated a festival that _she_ called the Ovuliparity Jubilee. Kanan had always wondered whether that was a real Nautolan cultural tradition or simply Fisto’s elaborate and ongoing prank, and even as an adult he was afraid to ask.

Anyway, Kanan might not have completed his education but he knew enough to keep his hands to himself in the Pool of the Mother. Still, he didn’t shrink back when someone happened to rub up against him. And he noticed that happening more frequently, the more time he spent there.

Then—the day before the cruise was set to end (although of course this depended entirely on the whims of the turtle, and Kanan’s ticket had a nonrefundability clause should the giant beast suddenly decide to change its thousand-year pattern of migration)—one of the Nautolans surfaced right in front of him and blew a little fountain of water directly onto the bridge of his nose. This, he knew, meant _hi_. It was playful and friendly, and Kanan smiled even as he wiped the droplets out of his eyes.

“Why do you always wear that?” the Nautolan demanded. She had turquoise-colored rings in her head-tails. Kanan couldn’t help but think of her as female, for her slender build and beguiling eyes, even though he _knew_ this species doesn’t construct gender that way. She was moving her webbed fingers closer to him, leaving ripples in the surface of the water.

“Wear what?” Kanan said. Then her hand  went underwater, and Kanan had a bare minute to register what her curving lips and unblinking, multireflecting stare might means before he felt the hard end of her fingers running up his leg. She tugged on the leg of his swimming briefs, pulling it out and then letting it slap back against his inner thigh.

“Oh,” Kanan coughed. “It’s… it’s considered polite where I’m from to keep…reproductive parts covered.”

“Do you think I’m stupid?” she demanded.

“I—no!” he floundered.

“Are _you_ stupid?”

“Probably,” Kanan admitted, and then suddenly she was laughing, and so was everyone else in the pool.

“We know about modesty conventions,” someone on the other side of the pool said. His voice—this older Nautolan’s relaxed stance and broad chest read as masculine to Kanan, even though he kept reminding himself that he was projecting his own limited view onto these people—was indulgently amused. “We’ve been wondering why you keep to them _here_ , when you see that we don’t.”

“We’ve been talking a lot about you, when you’re not here,” the slender one with the turquoise rings said brightly.

“That’s not nice, Tu’ana,” reproved a heavy-set…woman?...on the other side of the pool. And then to Kanan: “She means that we want to bring you into the community. Not that we’re gossiping behind your behind.”

Kanan’s first thought was simple relief: whew, he'd guessed Tu’ana’s pronoun preference in Basic correctly. His second thought was to register the idiomatic _behind your behind_ and to swallow a laugh. “That’s very nice of you,” he said. “Thank you.”

But Tu’ana’s unnerving eyes were fixed on his. “You come here,” she said. “Every day. You feel the rhythms of the Mother. But you keep yourself apart.”

 _Nope nope nope._ He was not going to let the conversation go any farther down this path. His instinctive reaction was to deflect with smart-aleck, sexually aggressive confidence. “I would never hold myself apart from _you_ ,” he drawled. “You can get as close to me as you want.”

The membranes of her eyes nictated in pleasure. “Oh good,” she said. “We were hoping you’d say that.”

He barely had time to register the _we_ in her statement when she submerged, a thin line of bubbles registering where she used to be. And then he felt nimble hands—hands that were very used to working underwater—tugging at his swimwear.

The turtle gave a great, slow push of its fins. A huge wave slammed through their pool, and some of the swimmers rose up while others sank down. Kanan was simply thrown backwards. He grasped the ropes that constituted the wall of the pool and held his breath when he went under.

Dragged through the current, he was pulled down, down—then up—and the whole time hands, more than two, were grabbing at his briefs. He was naked when he broke the surface again. Tu’ana’s lovely head popped up beside him. “We want you to join us,” she said solemnly. “In giving seed to the Mother.”

There was no pretending he didn’t know what that meant. Neither the _seed_ nor the _we_. All around the pool, the others—mostly Nautolans, but not all—were watching him with careful eyes. He _desperately_ wanted to make light of this, and was terrified that he couldn’t. There was something tugging all around him, some deep and mysterious current. If he was on solid land, Kanan would have run.

All he had here was the mirror of himself in the water. Kanan Jarrus, drifter, cares for nothing and no one. Faced with a dozen nubile and willing Nautolans (and two or three wet, equally willing sentients of other species), the Kanan Jarrus of his reflection would feel nothing but triumph. _Score, right?_

“Risks,” he coughed finally. “I, uh, I have milliplex, but I’m on the strip.”

Tu’ana tilted her head, giving him an unutterably condescending smile. “You are not at risk _here_ ,” she said. “Neither are we.” And then her head disappeared beneath the wavering, reflective surface of the pool. A minute later, he felt her hands pushing his knees apart.

“Contraception?” Kanan managed. The broad-chested Nautolan answered him:

“Not a risk.”

And then—oh, stars. He was getting a blowjob from an aquatic species, in the water, as the slow steady pulse of the swimming turtle surged all around them. And it was a _them_. There were hands bearing him up every time the water washed over him. The pulse of the tide and the pulse of Tu’ana’s mouth worked in harmony. Kanan’s mouth opened soundlessly. He was floundering. They were all around him.

“You’re the center,” someone whispered in his ear. “Yes?”

“Yes,” Kanan said hoarsely. He had no idea what he was agreeing to, but: _yes_. He was the center. He felt that too.

The tides broke on his consent. More and more hands slid onto, under, and over his body. Tu’ana’s mouth had never left his cock. Someone beneath him—underwater—was gently pushing at the entrance to his ass. Someone else was taking his hand in theirs, rubbing it against what felt like a warm, wet slit.

A fourth—a fifth? A sixth?—person’s hands were beneath his head, bearing him up as the water rose and fell. Guiding his face with gentle insistence against themselves. Kanan moaned aloud as he was engulfed, penetrated, enfolded: as he tried, with his hands and fingers and hips, to give the insistent tides what they demanded of him.

“Release,” someone whispered in his ear, at the same time that he was steadily licking at somebody else’s bodily opening. “Release.” The refrain was taken up all around him—in the air, in the water. He felt the vibrations moving over him in frequencies he could not possibly hear. In the deep black depths the grandmother of turtles sang to him: _Release._

And— _oh stars, oh no_ , he thought. _I am not taking sexual advice from anyone’s grandma, let alone a turtle_. But he was coming, he was absolutely coming, and it was inexorable as the tides. The waves of pleasure were soft and gentle but they also went on and on.

As he floated, held up and caressed by many hands, Kanan became aware that the water around him had turned cloudy. The Nautolans were coming up to him, rubbing against him, holding him tight for a moment and then swimming away, leaving something of themselves near him. Oh, he _should_ have known. He agreed to be the blasted center of an aquatic orgy, what else did he expect from a species that fertilizes their eggs outside their bodies?

In truth, it wasn’t the ejaculate washing all across his skin that he minded. That part was—enh—companionable. They were still holding up his head and stroking him gently, and the after-shocks of pleasure were still rippling through his body.

What he truly, deeply minded was the fact that he could now hear a song washing over him as well. It wasn’t coming from anywhere except maybe _below._ It wasn’t the turtle’s song, although the turtle was swimming in time with it, and it wasn’t even the grandmother’s song. But it was a deep, vast harmony that loved him, that missed him, that wanted him to come home. It called to him gently through each one of the hands that stroked his skin.

Kanan pulled himself out of the Pool of the Mother as soon as he decently could, and the next day—when the turtle docked—he hired himself out on the first freighter shipping from Glee Anselm.

He never went back.

**Now. The Present.**

In an instant—just as people say happens to the dying—scenes from his life flash up behind his mind’s eye. They come in serial, three of them. In each one the faces of his lovers have grown distant and blurred, and yet there’s a piece of the memory that’s crystal clear. The taste, the pain, the fear.

Kanan gives the Inquisitor’s lightsaber another push. It’s possible that she’s pulling these images out of his head. Let her have them.

What he _does_ go for—that, she can’t have. That, she never will. He sees disappointment sour her face.

She could try on all the carnal pleasures from here to Nal Hutta. It wouldn’t be enough; it would never be enough. Not unless she met someone who could strip her every brittle defense and show her a way to live without self-hatred and despair.

“I don’t go for crazy,” Kanan growls. “…Anymore.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Nautolan stuff is all noncanonical but I like my version of their gender structures better. Milliplex is something I made up too; you can read my justification for giving Kanan space herpes [here](http://worriedaboutmyfern.tumblr.com/post/130206953326/another-sexual-headcanon).
> 
> For more fics exploring Kanan's sordid past, I'd recommend "[Hiding Out in the Back](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4265847)" by Xenadd.


	17. The Forgotten Droid

Alone in his quarters—washed and dressed for bed—Kanan seeks peace in meditation. The day’s events drift through his mind, each considered and then set aside. He still can’t believe Chopper made a friend.

He _truly_ can’t believe Chopper saved the entire rebel fleet, and finally found a secure location to headquarter their forces. “Chopper Base,” they’re going to call it. So that is a real thing that’s actually happening.

Yet there’s a deeper sticking point, under that thought. Not just the absurdity of it. The question isn’t how he’s arrived at this point: the question is where he’ll go next.

 _I can stay until we’re sure the base will be safe…_ he thinks. The fragment of intention eases off into silence. Kanan sits with the silence, dropping down a little deeper into the moment, and at last the thought completes:

 _…but if I stay too long, it won’t be safe anymore._ The Inquisitors are tracking him and Ezra through the Force. He’d harbored that suspicion for some time, and now he’s sure of it.

_Find Malachor._

The way forward is clear. It’s just that he fears what may lie at the end of the path. The last time he and Ezra faced the Inquisitors, they were soundly defeated; only Ahsoka’s intervention saved their lives. And behind the Inquisitors there is something even worse. The Sith Lord…Kanan has never sensed such power, or such malevolence.

 _Try to fight, and you will fail. The Rebellion will be destroyed. You will die; your apprentice will become a servant of evil._ Was that only meant to test his resolve? Or was it a prophecy?

A light rap outside the hatch brings Kanan out of his thoughts. He opens his eyes: “Come in,” he calls. He knows it’s Hera before the hatch opens. She’s already in her sleep clothes too (thermal leggings, a soft wrap-around top and a headscarf) and she’s got her datapad in her hand.

“I thought you might want to know,” she says. “Initial surveys are complete, and Sato has approved the site. Construction’s already beginning. I told him we’d start making supply runs in six hours.”

Kanan stands and walks over to her wordlessly. She’s so beautiful and so passionately, uncompromisingly, ferociously good: in the face of overwhelming injustice she fights tirelessly and inspires others to fight as well. Even when the forces against her seem insurmountable—even when others, including Kanan himself, would persuade her to abandon the struggle. She will never, ever surrender.

“What is it?” she says, her brilliant eyes lingering on his face. In answer he takes the datapad from her hand, pulls her against him, and kisses her.

As her mouth yields under his he thinks, again, of how extraordinarily lucky he’s been. That she is his, and he is hers. That she has given him everything he wanted, and so much that he never realized he needed. He loves her.

And that’s why he’ll leave her behind.

He runs his palm down the length of her lek and kisses her until she starts making throaty little whimpers, then he breaks away just long enough to set her datapad down. She’s a little breathless, looking at him with a question in her eyes. But she doesn’t say anything as he returns to fold her in his arms again.

Just this moment. He’ll let himself have just this, and then he’ll face what needs to be faced. He drops his head down to her shoulder and begins nuzzling her throat. Her fingers tangle in his hair, and when he starts pulling at the ties of her top she makes a small sound of anticipation that sends a shiver through him.

The top falls away. Hera breaks off their kiss, taking a step back: her lips curve in a smile as Kanan’s gaze travels over her body. “Do you _need_ something, love?” she teases. She reaches up to sweep her headscarf away, shaking out her lekku as they pull free.

“You,” Kanan says hoarsely. “Always you.”

She takes another step back, towards his bunk, and he follows her. Then she’s hooking her fingers under her leggings, giving her hips a little shimmy as she peels them lower—Kanan’s breath catches in his throat, and her affectionate smile widens a little. She steps out of the leggings and slides naked into his bunk.

He joins her there, leaving his own sleep pants beside hers on the deck. Hera’s skin is warm and soft beside his own. He wants to hold her and never let go.

Instead he guides her with gentle touches to turn so that he’s pressed against her back. He slides one arm beneath her shoulders and the other around her hips. This is one of his favorite ways to have her: her body stretched alongside his and wrapped inside the circle of his arms. From here he can kiss the side of her throat, the back of her neck, the lengths of her lekku. He can touch every part of her. And he can hold her against him tightly enough that when she begins to twitch and writhe, she’ll rub against him with every motion.

He palms her breasts and strokes her thighs. Kisses her gently and insistently. He rouses her with persistent touches, finding more and more sensitive places until she’s panting and bucking under his hands. He knows her well enough to bring her to the brink very quickly, when he wants to. Pleasure builds in him too: the sight of her shapely body shuddering under his hands. The erotic sensations of her ass sliding against his cock.

He thinks about coming on her skin, and then she moans his name and he’s undone. A spike of ecstacy sweeps through him; he tightens his grip on her as his mouth opens in a low-voiced cry. Just as the waves of his climax are fading, she finds her own peak, stiffening against him and turning her face into the bunk to stifle a scream.

They sprawl together, boneless and panting. Once he’s recovered a bit, Kanan leans down from the bunk to pull a wipe from his drawers. He cleans the traces of himself from her backside gently and tenderly, then presses a kiss against her skin.

“Better?” she asks.

He takes a deep breath. Lies back down beside her, pulling her into the curve of his arm. “Hera,” he says. “Once the base is established—Ezra and I have to go. We’ll need to take Ahsoka too.”

She blinks up at him. “Another Jedi mission? When will you be back?” Her voice is still muzzy with pleasure.

Kanan shakes his head. “I don’t know. But our presence here is putting the entire fleet at risk. We can’t return until we’ve found a solution to the problem of the Inquisitors.”

Her eyes widen as she takes in the implications. “That’s…that’s open-ended,” she says at last.

“Yes,” is all he can say.

She sits up. Her voice is much sharper now: it’s back to business. “I told Sato six hours,” she says. “We should get some rest.”

“Are you staying?” he asks. But she’s already climbing over him, sliding out of the bunk.

“I want to look over the survey reports,” she says. “The atmospherics may affect our flight patterns.” She doesn’t look at him as she pulls her sleepwear back on and collects her datapad.

“All right,” he tells her. “Get some sleep.”

She leaves without a backward glance. Her resolve is inimitable; it’s one of the things he loves about her. But his bunk still smells of sex and Hera. Kanan lays his head down again, and closes his eyes for his last night at home.


	18. The Mystery of Chopper Base

Hera’s blowing hot and cold. She can feel it happening, but it’s hard to correct course. Kanan’s _right,_ she knows he is: if the Inquisitors can sense him and Ezra, then they can’t stay on the new base. The logic of it only makes her angrier.

She tries to find refuge in the work, flying supply runs for two shifts straight. Kanan spends the whole time in combat practice with Ezra. She’s so proud of how far they’ve come.

She’s so afraid of where they’re going.

Most of it she doesn’t understand. Visions, Sith Lords, places out of legend. But she knows Kanan—and it’s _his_ fear that has her terrified. He’s drilling Ezra grimly, relentlessly; that means he’s afraid that neither Ezra’s skills nor his own will be enough. He’s running from the rest of them in order to draw the danger with him; that means he thinks they couldn’t withstand it together.

She counts on Kanan to find her a path to victory in the direst situations. What he’s doing now means he can’t see one.

But the last thing she wants is to burden or distract him. He’s trying hard to keep his fears private, to act as if their departure is just an ordinary mission. She tries to let him.

She says: “I thought you’d be more excited about our new base. We finally have a place to call home?” What she means is: _Maybe it’s time to stop running._

He plays it off as a joke, pulling a ridiculous face to try and make her smile. And just like that Hera snaps back over into anger. How can he presume that she’d be smiling _now_? How could he presume to make love to her, and then tell her he’s leaving indefinitely? It could’ve been their last time and she didn’t even know.

She turns her back on him and stalks off. And a moment later regrets it: course corrections, hot and cold. She can’t put her resentments onto him, that isn’t fair—and it won’t help him, wherever he’s going. The next time she speaks to him she makes an effort to keep her voice friendly.

He says the new base has everything she needs. What he means is: Everything she needs to fight the war without him.

He says: “We can’t run from the Inquisitors forever.” What he means is: _But I can lead them away from_ _you._

She turns away again, and this time he follows her. Reaches out, puts a hand on her shoulder.

He says: “Hera, what you’ve accomplished here is important. I understand that now. The need for us to be part of a larger rebellion. I’m behind you. But none of it will matter if _we_ don’t do what we need to do.” He’s telling her: _I will give my life if necessary for your cause._

But she doesn’t need to hear any of this. It’s war, they’ve both known that—Hera’s always known it. Sacrifices are made in war. Just not this, not this; she used to tell herself she was prepared to lose him, and then she almost _did_ because she gave up on him too soon. After that she stopped imagining it, stopped trying to prepare. It would not have helped her anyway.

And she was never prepared to lose Ezra.

They’re interrupted by a report from one of the pilots: Lieutenant Dicer hasn’t checked in. Probably an equipment malfunction. “Take the Phantom,” Hera tells Rex and Sabine. Those two will provide capable assistance no matter what the issue.

“Is there an ETA from Ahsoka?” Kanan asks.

“She’s half a rotation out,” the comm tech answers.

Half a rotation. One night. The words slide through Hera with an icy chill. She’d thought they had so much more time.

She walks to the base’s entrance, looking for Ezra. She spots him on a distant ridge, sitting with Zeb under a makeshift canopy. The lines of their bodies are loose and relaxed. They’re watching the sunset: the colors are beautiful.

She stands there for a long moment, until Kanan joins her again. He whistles softly: “Look at those colors.” And despite the fact that she’d just been thinking the exact same thing, a fresh surge of irritation washes over her. He thinks she cares about the colors? At a time like this?

“Stop talking,” she snaps. She’s so tired of trading irrelevant words as their last hours slip away. Everything she says is wrong anyway: what she _just_ said was wrong, too harsh a tone, too brusque a command. There’s a look of surprise and even dismay on his face. She reaches for his hand instead.

There. As his fingers close around hers, there’s an honesty to the pressure of their hands together that she can’t find in their words. He shifts closer to her, his arm tight against her shoulder. _Lean on me._

But she can’t afford to. She drops his hand. “Hera—” he starts.

“No. Follow me.” She strides off briskly. Her feet know where she’s going before her mind does. It’s more of an impulse than a plan, or maybe just an inchoate collection of all the things she’s not saying: _stop running, not this, could’ve been our last time._ The base is only half finished but she’s seen the schematics. There’s a medbay toward the back, and attached to it, a small storage area.

The medbay is not yet operational, but the supply closet opens to her authorization. It’s already stocked with some basic medical supplies.

“What are we doing here?” Kanan asks her. She leads him inside and punches in a code to lock the door.

“ _You_ are going to _stop talking_ ,” she says, and then she grabs two fistfuls of his shirt so that she can pull him around and shove him up against the door. As his back hits the metal he slides down, bracing himself with a bent knee against the door, so that she can reach any part of him. That means what it’s always meant: _any time, any place, I am yours._

But it’s a lie. He’s only hers for one more night.

She kisses him, hard and hungry, and yanks his shirts loose so she can slide her hands across his skin. She lets her nails rake across his chest. She bites his lower lip. She’s hurting and he’s the source of it, and she knows it’s not fair but she’s angry at him for it.

She wants him to show her that he’s hurting too.

His hands are on her hips, dragging her closer. She grinds against him, rolling her hips aggressively. He breaks off their kiss. “Hera, are you sure—”

“Stop talking.”

“But—”

“I will _gag_ you,” she threatens, and then he smirks.

“Don’t you have other uses for my mouth?”

“No,” she says shortly, and grabs a bandage from the nearest shelf. Kanan’s eyebrows climb.

She kisses him again, gently this time, then lifts the fabric to his face, smoothing it over his lips. His eyes on hers are intent, searching. Then he tilts his chin forward so she can tie the bandage behind his head. She leaves it loose, not terribly functional—more a reminder than anything else. A statement of all the things that can’t be said.

Once she has the gag in place she starts working on his belt. When she slides a hand inside his pants she finds he’s already hard. She grinds against him again, this time straddling his thigh while her fingers play with the head of his cock. And she pulls down his collar so that she can bite at his neck, working at his skin with her teeth and tongue. She hopes to leave a mark. Let him carry something that she gave him on his skin, when he goes.

Behind the gag he makes a soft sound of pleasure and surrender. Hera wraps her hand more tightly around him and shifts, trying to find the right angle for her own satisfaction. Then Kanan moves his knee up a fraction, giving her more direct pressure, and she closes her eyes as a jolt of ecstasy washes through her. He moves his hands to her lekku, flicking the tips with his thumbs, and then the jolt becomes a steady, surging pulse.

For a moment there is just this. No tomorrow, not even a next minute. No goodbyes to be said: nothing at all to be said. Just their hands on each other. Just their bodies working in sync, trading comfort back and forth, seeking refuge in the sweet, intensifying heat of sensation.

Then both their comlinks activate. “This is Spectre Five, we’re under attack! We need backup—ahhh!”

Hera pulls back at once. Kanan immediately pulls the bandage off his head, and as he snaps up his belt and pants she calls into the comlink: “Spectre Five! Come in! Sabine!” But only static answers.

“Spectre Four and Spectre Six,” Kanan chimes in. “Meet us at the Ghost—Chopper, prepare for flight.”

“Come on,” Hera says, keying open the door. “Let’s get going.”

She thinks about that later. After the nightmarish struggle with the spider-creatures; after dawn has come, and her loved ones have gone. She told him: “Get going.”

What she means is: _come back, come back, come back_.


	19. Twilight of the Apprentice, Part One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is rated gen, and centers on Rex and Ahsoka.

“You’re back,” Rex says, his eyes soft with affection. Ahsoka thinks he shows his emotions more readily, now. Or maybe it’s just that time and loss have softened the lines of his face, made him easier to read. So much of what he’s been through she can only guess at—the same way she suspects he can guess at the outlines of her own experiences.

“Only briefly,” she tells him. Her mission was a success: she’s found a map to Malachor. The next step on their path will be to follow it.

She’s already checked in with Ezra. Kanan stands a little ways apart, holding Hera in his arms. She doesn’t want to intrude on that. Whatever understanding they have, it doesn’t seem to be a struggle for him. It doesn’t haunt him the way so many of the Jedi once closest to her were haunted by the loves they gave up—or the ones they never could.

“Ah,” Rex says. “Do you have a little time to spare for an old friend?”

She smiles. “Always.”

He walks toward the perimeter, beckoning for her to follow. She falls in at his side. The sun is rising, painting the skies with gentle hues. “I recently obtained something that I was hoping to share with you,” Rex says. “Hera brought it down for me on her last supply run.” He gestures to a small stack of crates, set off to the side.

“A gift?” Ahsoka asks, genuinely surprised. Rex knows that material possessions have never been important to her.

“An experience,” he says. He touches the smallest, topmost of the crates in two places, and it hisses open. Wisps of chill fog emerge, and Rex—handling it as delicately as a live explosive—pulls out a small crystal bottle, still rimmed with frost. “Bilar honeywine.” He sets the bottle down carefully and reaches back into the crate for two delicate, sparkling little cups, each small enough to be held in a cupped palm.

“I do need to be sober for our next journey,” Ahsoka says with amusement.

“What, you can’t drink like a soldier?” Rex teases. He’s already pouring out the amber liquid, filling each cup to the brim. “Best only have one glass.”

When the cups are full he puts down the bottle and picks them both up, one in each hand. He’s still moving slowly and with great care: not a drop spills. “We can sit over here,” he says, “and watch the sun come up.”

So Ahsoka walks with him, settling cross-legged on the edge of a rise. She accepts one of the cups when Rex hands it to her, treating it with the same mindfulness that he did. “Thank you,” she says quietly.

“You’re welcome.” He clears his throat, then goes on a little gruffly: “We’ve both been through enough bitter times. I wanted to make sure you had some sweetness in your life as well.”

The unexpected surge of emotion makes her blink rapidly. To cover her momentary loss of composure, Ahsoka lifts the crystal cup and takes a sip.

“Oh,” she says, then tastes again. “It’s wonderful.” The taste of the honeywine triggers emotions and images as well as sense receptors: it tastes of flowers and freedom and long careless summer days that blend into twilight. It tastes of tall deep-rooted trees, and the vines that twist through their branches, and the blossoms that grow on those vines, and the busy pollinators that flit between them,  and the people that harvest their nectar and make the wine. It’s the taste of a whole rich intertwined community, a peaceful and a happy one. It tastes of _life_. “The Bilar are a group sentience, aren’t they?”

“A hive-mind,” Rex agrees. “Individually they don’t have much intelligence, or so I understand it.” He takes a sip from his own cup, then adds quietly: “The honeywine is harder to get these days, since the Empire classified the Bilar as exotic pets. But it’s one of their only trade exports. The revenue supports their efforts to resist the trappers who prey on their people.”

Ahsoka wishes she could say that she’s surprised, but she’s not. There’s no place in the galaxy left where a sweetness like this could exist without sorrow. The dark shadow of the Empire corrupts everything it touches. She takes another sip and says: “Then they too are why we fight.”

Rex’s gaze is on the horizon. “I was made for war,” he says thoughtfully. “I grew up in it; so did you. Now I’ve grown old in it. I may never know anything else.” He turns to her then, and his warm brown eyes are full of affection and compassion. “I hope that you do.”

“Oh, Rex,” she says softly, and leans her head against his shoulder. The armor plating isn’t exactly comfortable, but she doesn’t move. After a moment he wraps his arm around her.

Slowly, the sun rises. A few more sips, and the honeywine is gone. Ahsoka lifts her head and looks back at the main camp: Kanan and Hera have returned. They’re standing with the rest of their team, near the Phantom. It looks like farewells are being made.

“It’s time for me to go,” she says.

Rex draws back, and Ahsoka rises in a fluid gesture. Rex is a little stiffer climbing to his feet, but she pretends not to notice.

“Forgive me,” he tells her, “if I don’t say goodbye. I’ve had enough of those.”

She shakes her head. “It’s not goodbye,” And then she smiles: “For one thing, you can always holocom me.”

“I might just do that,” Rex says.

“Thank you for the wine.” She hands him her empty cup, and he gives her a solemn nod. Then she turns back toward the others. And she makes sure she’s gone far enough that he can’t possibly hear her when she whispers: “Goodbye, Rex.”


	20. Twilight of the Apprentice, Part Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a repost of a fic originally posted as a stand-alone story, and again I'm sorry for erasing everyone's comments and bookmarks by moving it into this series. It really belongs here, though.

Kanan sees red. Sometimes, flickering shapes. He can’t tell if that’s an artifact of his brain struggling to process input it no longer has, or information that he’s picking up through the Force and doesn’t yet understand. From what he knows of the state of his eyes, it’s highly unlikely to be anything he’s truly “seeing.”

Out in the common room, Sabine is telling everyone about things she read on the HoloNet. “…Can’t leave things like this lying around,” she’s saying. “He could trip over it. Everything has to go back in its spot, so he can find things when he’s looking for them.”

There’s an answering grumble from Zeb, which Kanan can’t quite pick up. His deeper voice doesn’t carry as well as Sabine’s.

Kanan isn’t trying to eavesdrop. He’s trying to meditate. But sound has always carried on the Ghost.

“And we should put tactile dots to label all the galley controls,” Sabine is saying. “So he can tell what the settings are. If—” she pauses, and when she speaks again her voice is a little softer. More hesitant. “If we put the dots in the cockpit, too…he could still fly the ship. If necessary.”

Now Zeb’s loud enough—exasperated enough—for Kanan to pick up. “How much trouble are you _expecting_ that it’s gonna be _necessary_ for the blind guy to fly the _ship_?”

“There’s actually a large number of unsighted pilots with shuttle- and freighter-class licenses,” Sabine says stubbornly. “Even nav droids that are specifically programmed to work with unsighted pilots!”

Kanan clenches his jaw and seeks focus, trying to shut down his awareness of the conversation. Chopper has now joined in with some indignant grinding, protesting the idea that a second droid might be required, and Sabine and Zeb are talking over each other. Hera’s voice, reasonable and reassuring, threads through like a counterpoint.

Shadows flicker in the red sea behind his eyes.

Kanan stands and paces to the door. Hears it open. Trails his fingers along the passageway, counting steps and turns until he reaches the ‘fresher.

He cleans his hands and face, picking at his fingernails to make sure there’s no grime there. He brushes out his hair and reties it. Then he shaves, carefully monitoring the progress of the depilator with his free hand. He touches the end of one sideburn and then the other repeatedly, until he’s sure that they’re the same length. The bandage across his burned eyes helps provide something of a guideline. At least for the beard he can use an automatic length setting on the depilator.

Kanan’s never been inordinately vain about his appearance, but he doesn’t like being sloppy. Those fourteen years of Temple discipline are still with him to some degree. _Everything is connected, and the care we take for ourselves mirrors the care we take for others, and for our environment._ (Who said that? Master Nu?) It used to take him only a few minutes every day to keep himself neat. Now, he’s been in the ‘fresher half a standard hour and he’s still not sure he got everything right.

The discussion in the galley is over. Kanan concentrates for a moment, then locates Ezra in his quarters. The kid’s voice had been conspicuously absent from the conversation. He’s been keeping to himself a lot lately—which Kanan hasn’t found odd, since Kanan has been something of a recluse since Malachor as well. They’ve both needed some time.

Shadows flicker through the redness of his vision as Kanan walks with measured paces through the passageways. He counts the hatches that his fingers brush over. Finds Ezra’s, and presses the buzzer.

Ezra blinks out of Kanan’s extended awareness. That has to be because Ezra’s clamping down on his thoughts—shielding his emotions. There’s motion inside the cabin. Kanan waits, with a pretty good semblance of patience. Whatever’s going on with the kid, he has a right to some privacy.

The door opens. “Hey,” says Ezra, over-casual.

“Hey,” Kanan says. “I wanted to talk to you about getting back on a training schedule.”

“Are you su—” Ezra swallows the end of the word, then starts again. “I mean, are you sure you’re ready?”

“Yeah.” Kanan stretches his mouth into a lopsided grin. “Watch out. I’m not gonna hold back.” (Many, many of the traditional Jedi training exercises were conducted blindfolded, or in other ways stressed the importance of relying on Force-awareness rather than physical senses. Kanan suddenly has a new appreciation for those lessons, and he needs to make sure Ezra gets some fluency in the same abilities. He’s been thinking about how to jury-rig some of the equipment they’ll need.)

“Uh, yeah. No. Right,” Ezra says.

“Tomorrow, then,” Kanan tells him. “Bright and early.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” The door whooshes closed again as Kanan turns away. That was painful. Well, he’ll talk to the kid tomorrow. First they’ll train, try to establish some normalcy. Kanan will stretch himself, demonstrate that he still has things to teach. Maybe after that they’ll be on firmer ground.

He pushes his awareness out a little farther. Hera’s left the galley; she’s in the cockpit now. Shadows crowd around him as Kanan walks down the passageway—one step at a time, careful and slow.

He hears her chair swivel as the hatch opens. “Kanan!” There’s surprise and happiness in her voice. Fabric rustles—she’s standing up.

But she checks herself before she comes to him. Good: he doesn’t need her to. He finds the co-pilot’s chair on his own and sinks into it. “How much longer to the rendezvous?”

“We’re a little over halfway.” Her voice is coming from a spot slightly lower than he expects—she sat down again, and he didn’t hear it. He changes the angle of his head, reorienting to where he thinks her face is now.

“Are my sideburns even?” he asks her.

Her fingertips brush the side of his face. “Mm. This one’s a little higher.” Then she tugs on the bandage, evening it out. Ah. If the bandage was skewed, that would throw off his measurements.

Her touch lingers, tracing the corner of his mouth, the line of his jaw. “How are you doing?” she asks softly.

He thinks about the question. There are many possible answers, and _fine_ is one. He is lucky, and he knows it. Unlike Ahsoka, he came back. And he came back to a good life, one where he is both capable and needed. He can still teach Ezra, still help Hera fight the Empire, still defend and inspire and comfort his family.

But _fine_ is not the answer he gives. “I’m tired,” he says, and hears the honesty and the rawness in his own voice. “I’m waiting for it to get easier. Every little thing is so much harder than it used to be. I _can_ do it, I will do it—I’m just tired.”

Her hand drops to his shoulder. “Can I help?”

So he puts his own hand over hers, stroking the leather of her gloves. “Yes,” he says. “You are.”

The chair swivels again. She’s moving. Standing up—her hand slides over his shoulder and behind his neck, and then she’s leaning over the back of his chair, both arms wrapped around him. He leans his head back, raising his face to where he thinks she is.

She kisses him, slow and sweet. For a moment Kanan’s world is familiar again: just the pressure of her lips against his, and the smell of her skin.

When she pulls back he asks: “How are _you_?”

“Mostly good,” she says. “I’m worried about you. And Ezra.”

“I know. I’m going to talk to Ezra.”

“Sabine is in full problem-solving mode.”

“I heard,” Kanan says slowly. “The tactile labels…are a good idea. But I’m not going to try to fly the Ghost unless we really do have no other choice.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to.” She strokes her fingers over his brow, tracing the hairline. “You could practice on the Phantom, though. Chopper thinks his friend can help.”

“Oh, you talked him into that?”

There’s a richness to Hera’s voice that makes him think she’s smiling. “Chopper would say it was his idea all along.”

“So _Sabine_ talked him into it.”

“Something like that.” Her hand folds along the side of his face, knuckles brushing his cheek, and her voice grows more serious. “I’m so glad you came back.”

“I did,” he says. He catches her hand, then twists in the chair so that his fingers can follow the line of her arm. He’s touching her through her clothing, but he can trace the flesh beneath—the curve of her elbow, the rise of her shoulder. “I truly did. I’m still here.”

“I know,” she says, warm and teasing. “I can see you.”

That hangs there, between them, just a moment too long. She doesn’t move, but he can picture her closing her eyes in a wince.

“I can see you, too,” he says. “I can, Hera.”

“With—the Force?”

He raises his other hand—the one that’s not touching her—and waggles it in a “fifty-fifty” gesture. “I always saw you with more than my eyes,” he says. “But there’s some pictures I’m gonna carry to my grave.”

Her breath sounds like laughter, but it’s got a little hitch in it. He wraps both arms around her and gives her a tug. She settles in his lap, tracing his face with her fingers. At last she leans in to kiss him again.

This time he takes charge, deepening the kiss and making it more urgent. She’s a little breathless when she pulls back to ask: “Do you want—”

“Oh yes,” he says.

“Here?”

In response he reaches back, towards the controls. “If those dot labels were here now,” he says, “I could find the button that seals the hatch.”

Hera leans into him, over him, and guides his hand down. “It’s right…there.”

He pushes his fingers down, hears a soft click. Hera starts dropping little kisses under his jaw, and one of her hands slides through his hair, pulling it loose. Kanan almost laughs, because all of this is so familiar, and so right, and all the gratitude that he’s been telling himself he _should_ feel suddenly and actually floods his heart. He’s alive. He’s so glad to be alive.

He grabs her thigh, pulling her tightly against him, and arches his neck to give her all the access she wants. She licks and nuzzles at his skin until he groans. His hands are rubbing up and down her body, making little circles through the fabric of her flight suit.

These fastenings yield easily to his fingers. Muscle memory. He slides a hand inside her clothing, cupping one of her breasts. She gasps and nestles closer. Her lips are still moving all over his skin.

When she starts pulling at the straps of his shoulder armor he helps, though his own hands keep returning to her soft curves. He lets her draw his pullover off as well, but catches her hands before she can drop it on the deck. “I need to find that again,” he murmurs.

“Right,” she says. “I’ll put all your things back here—on the chair just behind us.”

Then he regrets saying anything, because she stands up, leaving him a little colder. For a few heartbeats he’s alone in the redness.

When she comes back, her weight settling onto him again, he stands. It’s abrupt enough that Hera makes a startled sound of surprise and clutches at him—but he’s got her, supporting her with a completely impudent hand under her ass and another wrapped around her back. He spins and lands her into the chair he just left, then leans over her to finish pulling off her flight suit. He kisses her shoulder, then dips his head lower. She gasps and arches her back when he draws her nipple into his mouth.

Soon he has her naked, the smooth sweep of her skin fully bared to his hands. He crouches down and pushes her knees apart. She sinks back into the chair with a happy sigh. He drops kisses along the inside of her thigh, and she laughs and squirms when his beard tickles her skin.

At last she scoots forward in the chair, a wordless but very obvious encouragement, and Kanan takes the hint. He kisses and licks her, no longer teasing but directly seeking her most sensitive places. She moans helplessly, shuddering—he never used his eyes for this. It was always about her scent, her taste, and the way she unravels so quickly and so completely beneath him.

Her thighs spread wider as she arches in the chair, gasping and trembling, hips lifting against his face. He could keep her on the edge like this for quite a while if he wanted. Sometimes he likes to. But now he grinds his tongue against her, meeting her desire with urgency of his own. He slides a finger insider her slick hot core, then another, and he matches each of her movements as she bucks and shudders and squirms. In this he’s ruthless—no backing off, no letting her flinch away for a moment’s respite. He works at her most vulnerable places relentlessly until her whole body arcs and she spasms around him with a muffled, gritted cry.

(Sounds like she’s flung her head to the side, trying to stifle her scream with the shoulder of the chair. She _really_ can’t help the sounds she makes; that’s part of why Kanan finds them so incredibly arousing. Although he’s aware of, and agrees with, her reasons for wanting to be discreet. No crew of any ship has ever wanted to hear the pilot suddenly screaming in the cockpit.)

At last she slumps back. Kanan raises his head and, yes, wishes he could see her. Naked limbs loose and languid, a sheen of sweat on her skin and a gleam of satisfaction in her beautiful green eyes.

At least he _got_ to see that. At least the image is there in his mind.

She pulls him up. He tries to settle beside her but the chair’s not really big enough—there’s some laughter, and rearranging of limbs, and she ends up on his lap again. She reaches down, stroking his cock through the fabric of his pants, and kisses him. He wonders if she can taste herself on his tongue.

Then she loosens his belt, and he stops thinking much of anything. There’s just her skillful hands working at him, tugging his desire and his tension and his need into a rising wave of pure sensation.

She lets go, but it’s only to shift herself over him—hands gripping his shoulders, knees on either side of his thighs. Then she takes him in hand again, guiding his cock into her as she sinks down. Warm, soft, wet— “Hera,” he gasps. His hands have found her hips. “Hera,” he says again as she rocks against him. Her name is both prayer and benediction in his mouth.

Shadows dance in the redness. Hera moves and Kanan moves with her, slow and steady pulses of pleasure. _She_ could keep _him_ on the edge indefinitely, probably—this gentle rhythm isn’t enough to bring him release, but it’s certainly enough to keep him committed. He slides his hands up her back, holding her loosely, and turns his head to press a soft kiss into the skin of her arm. She can have him however she wants.

Gradually she quickens the pace. Kanan feels his brows drawn together, hears his breath coming quick. It’s…close. He wishes he could see her, see her breasts and lekku bouncing. The thought makes him reach up to find her tchun. He strokes it, rolls the tip between his fingers, and hears her gasp. That’s good. That’s very good.

She pants into his ear: “You can fuck me harder.”

Kanan responds with a low groan and finds her hips again, this time gripping firmly. “Tell me,” he grinds out. “Tell me…what you’re doing…”

“I’m bouncing on your cock, love,” she whispers, her breath hot against his ear. “I want you to fuck me hard and fast—I want you to come inside me.” He drives into her then, his hips jerking upward in tight, controlled thrusts. She clings to him, making soft cries of pleasure with every stroke.

And then he’s falling over the edge, and there are starbursts all through the red.

Even as the waves of pleasure recede she’s still grinding against him—for herself, now, seeking the right angle and pressure. He rolls his hips against her and strokes and kisses her lekku until she finds her second peak. It seems less intense—she shakes in his arms, gives a few sweet whimpers of pleasure, and then relaxes.

He cradles her for a moment. Then her lips brush his—a quick, tender gesture—and she pulls away, saying something about checking the course headings. He can hear her putting her flight suit back on as he fastens up his pants. There’s a small smile lurking in the corners of his mouth.

It’s not relief, or it shouldn’t be relief—he wasn’t really nervous about his and Hera’s ability to connect. There’s no reason that losing his vision should have threatened that. And yet Kanan feels a satisfaction beyond the obvious. _There’s only one guy in the galaxy who can say that he just fucked Hera in the co-pilot’s chair, and that’s the guy right here with two thumbs and no eyes_.

His pullover and shoulder armor are on the chair behind, exactly where he expects them to be. As he’s buckling the armor Hera says: “I’m unlocking the hatch now, dear.”

“Good,” he says. “I’m going to try and fix the sideburns.” Although maybe he should just give up on the facial hair. Let it all grow out. It would make for one less daily struggle.

“Just so you know,” Hera says, “you’re still a very handsome man.”

“Why, Hera Syndulla,” he drawls. “I had no idea you thought of me that way.”

Her voice is dry: “Don’t let it go to your head.”

“Aye-aye, captain.”

The hatch opens for him, and closes again behind him. Kanan turns into the red, and starts once more to find his way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A final gift from Pornflakes: 
> 
>  

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Congratulations](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7099804) by [Tourlouxx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tourlouxx/pseuds/Tourlouxx)
  * [Keep My Eyes Closed](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13484820) by [TheAshla (cannedpeaches)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cannedpeaches/pseuds/TheAshla)




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